Palyne

You know, things in the lowcarb and weightloss categories have been coming up with me, that I haven’t known how to blog about. In part because they are not those happy-joy encouraging, positive things. And in part because I don’t really have an answer to anything, I’m just speculating. Let me go ahead and speculate on-blog-paper. Maybe other people have thought about similar issues. Feel welcome to comment because I’d really like other peoples’ input on this difficult subject.

I have observed the last few months that I can eat really well, and I’m not losing weight. Or when I do, it’s a very small amount over a rather long period of time. I can eat badly, and gain water weight, or actually lose weight on the scale, which is unintuitive, seems quite unfair, is even maddening. Long-term, yes, eating too many carbs drives my weight up, through the water/glycol storage if nothing else. But short term, it often drops the weight several pounds. Maybe because less protein means degraded LBM? God only knows. I can only tell you that the scale does not seem to adequately reflect my eating behavior in the short term. This is the case for other people I know who are about the same size as me, coming from a similar high weight as me.

And for the long term, eating badly will see the numbers rise, but eating well is not seeing them fall. Low calorie. High calorie. Moderate calorie. Low carb. High carb. Moderate carb. Vegetables. No vegetables. High fat. Low fat. With Gluten. Without it. With dairy. Without it. I admit I have not obsessively pursued every one of these, but there should be some vicarious experience here: I have friends online who have pursued many things I haven’t, are about the same size with the same history, and facing the same issues.

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Today I was looking at a sample diabetes association daily menu.

I was aghast. I know enough about my body to know that if I were trying to eat that, I would be starving, cold, miserable, obsessed with food, and probably either binging every few days or eventually just giving up altogether.

Lowcarb could save their life. It isn’t recommended because apparently the authorities think lowcarb is just so totally impossible nobody could eat like that.

I think the most complicating factor is that there are 1.7 billion items in the grocery store that will kill you, and 200 that won’t, 3/4 of which people have never eaten in their life. The situation’s worse in restaurants. But that has nothing to do with the eating plan. That’s environment. The environment in the home, people can manage.

*

When I first started lowcarb, I joked that it was “like trying to be Amish in New York City.” It was HARD. I was constantly faced with the seeming impossibility of getting food together and dealing with eating out somewhere and cooking all-the-freakin-time and so on. I did it, I lost weight, but it was a major pain in the ass.

Now lately, I’ve been doing fine on LC, imperfect but acceptable, losing weight, as has my kid. And I’m realizing: why was this hard?

What was so complicated about it previously, that it seemed hard?

*

I think some was a mental issue. That is, having grown up where endless varieties of crap were all expected to be put in your body for the fun of it, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of one key thing, which is this:

Food = Meat.
Veggies and fruits are nice treats, except if your meat variety is limited (you don’t eat organs, 9 kinds of meat, etc.) they are necessary to add in.

Once I got my head around that, and “animal-based protein” became my priority and vastly dominant food source, a whole lot of everything straightened out on its own.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t make coconut popovers or flax cocoa muffins or almond cookies or lowcarb pizza or whatever. It just means that everything which is not the primary bodily need is something ‘extra’. It isn’t really in the category of ‘food’ except maybe by some percentage of it.

*

I think some was a physical issue.

It is stunning how radically my desire to eat–and WHAT I desire to eat–changes depending on my food intake.

If I eat sufficient protein, veg/fruit and supplements, I pretty much lose most of my cravings for anything else. I don’t even think about food except when it’s time to eat. And I eat until I’m full and that’s fine. And it’s a miracle if I can even get as MANY carbs and calories as I’m trying for in my day. I can stand right next to chocolate, cheesecake, pasta, and literally not care. I don’t have any desire to eat them.

When I find myself “kinda wanting” things that aren’t my basic foods, I know that I haven’t had enough protein or fresh foods or supplements or something.

*

I think some was a habit issue.

I buy decent quantities of chicken and ground beef or roast and I cook it all at once in the crockpot or oven usually. On occasion I’ll chunk up chicken and bake it with a sauce, or throw the chunks in my wok, or coat ‘em with parmesan-herbs and bake, but usually I just cook it all at once. Then I drop it in the freezer or fridge. I can nuke it when I want food, I can mix it in with other foods, whatever. Now that I’ve started having some decent amounts of things in my freezer, often in serving-size plastic bowls, the stress about ‘not having food’ has dimmed a great deal.

It used to seem like a nightmare, the planning and shopping and cooking and cleaning. Now I buy mostly the same things, which takes out most of planning and simplifies shopping, I cook more seldom for ‘full meals’, which simplifies cleaning, too.

*

I think some was a cultural issue.

I grew up with the idea that a meal had several different components to it. You were supposed to have a little meat, a couple of side dishes, a drink, dessert. Except for much of my adult life, the meat took a hike or was barely-there in the midst of pasta or something.

I grew up with the idea that you ate three times a day. As I got older, I ate one time a day. Now I’ve completely ditched that mentality. Now:

* I have usually dairy+berries for meal 1, like a smoothie.
{1/2cup plain yogurt, 1/3cup cream, 1 egg, 6 ice cubes, 1/3 cup frozen wild blueberries or half a dozen frozen whole strawberries, vanilla, cinnamon, sweetzfree, blendered}

* I have eggs, usually with sausage, and hopefully a tiny bit of veggie, for meal 2.
{3 eggs and 2oz sausage, or 4 eggs 1oz sausage, or 3 eggs, 1oz meat, 1oz cheese, and part of a bell pepper}

* I may not have a meal 3 but if I do, it might be a bowl muffin, or a meat-centered leftover, nuked. It is usually very small (>2oz protein). It may include beans (some of the higher-fiber (lower ECC) beans) or peas, but not a lot.

* For meal 4 I have meat. Lots of it. Like 9-12oz depending on the meat and other meals of that day. It sometimes has a bit of veggie as part of it, in a stew or alongside (like bell peppers and broccoli in stir fry). Or not. Often it’s just plain meat. I often make a quick little sauce of some kind for the kid for dipping.

* I may not have a meal 5 but if I do, it might be a tiny gala apple and a few slices of cheese. I only have this if I began eating early and there’s at least 2+ hours before sleeping time.

* I take supplements (finally!), and I recently added a 5,000iu of Vitamin D3 from the Drs. Eades’s site (proteinpower.com) which I kid you not, within about 6 hours or so greatly improved my “sense of well-being.” I think it’s made a big difference. I use a potassium salt substitute to make sure I’m not getting too much sodium (I use sauces from jars/cans sometimes) and that I’m getting enough potassium. I drink diet soda, and then guilt (and zits) cure me and I drink only water for awhile, until I forget why I was doing that and go back to diet soda. ;-)

In the end I have about 20-26oz of animal-based protein a day (varies slightly), not enough veggies but some, a little fruit, a little too much dairy but not too extreme, sometimes a bit of legumes (beans or peas) and some supplements.

I’m losing weight on and the important thing is: I feel really good.

I’m deliberately eating more carbohydrates than I used to, but none of it’s junk, and none is a ton at once. My highest carb intake is my morning smoothie, except the occasion when I have a meat stew that contains some beans.

I don’t feel the way I do in a hard ketosis. I’d be losing weight faster if I were there, but my diet would be a lot more limited.

I don’t feel the way I do when I’m eating tons of carbs (like hell).

I actually feel as if for the first time in my life since I can remember, I must be eating in a way that my body is pretty happy with.

*

And it isn’t rocket science.

So what I can’t figure out is, up until now, why has it been so complicated?

If life is but a dream, as the sages say, then everything around us reflects us in some way.

And if the universe is holographic, as the sages and some physicists now suggest, then every reflected item or issue on one level, is probably present in myriad others.

It’s not merely as above, so below; it’s also as within, so without; and as here, so there; and every other possible permutation.

Most of the best advice in both practical and metaphysical terms, starts there.

While I wouldn’t take this to the extreme–I’m not obsessing over the deeper meaning in a hangnail–I do think that observing ‘the patterns of our reality’, so to speak, can be enlightening. It’s like an intro-spective activity using the extro-spective canvas. (Yes. I just made that word up.)

I’m the analogy-queen; I can see nearly anything as a dream-symbol, and correlate it to other things in my mind, heart, spirit, or other facets of experience. It doesn’t really matter how objectively valid this might be, as I figure anything from ’subconscious intuition’ to ‘God/guides’ can use this process to help me a little from the inside, even were it nothing more than my colorful imagination.

*

Today I started to make dinner (taco salad: kid-approved). I couldn’t help but notice, as I searched for something, that yet again my pitiful old fridge was so overstuffed it was ridiculous. Welcome to lowcarb, where nearly everything is perishable!

This is its normal state, mind you. I sometimes think I compost more food than I eat, mostly because stuff gets buried very easily, unseen, and then gets out of date, or replaced because I think I’m out of it. But as inflation around me seems to make the cost of eating, driving, and heating/cooling my house a lot harder than it used to be, the waste of that becomes a bigger deal.

So, like a cat that stops mid-step to lick a foot in desperate need apparently, I stopped in the middle of making dinner and cleaned out the fridge. REALLY well.

In the back of every shelf, and in the door, were innumerable jars and bottles of stuff. Pickles, pickled stuff, dressings, sauces, jams, you name it. Most of them probably date from a long time ago; although I clean the fridge now and then I usually don’t bug that kind of thing, thinking it’s still probably good. Most of them are also high-carb. I got rid of all of them like that.

I found a number of things important to me — a whole chicken, two long tubes of ground sausage, several cheeses — that were outdated or seriously molded and made me really mad at myself for forgetting they were in there and letting them get buried before I used them. (I thought I’d put the chicken in my chest freezer in the garage.) I got rid of everything outdated.

I nearly threw out a tub of yogurt that smelled like sour cream, despite only expiring two days ago, until I realized it WAS sour cream. I swear, I’m like I Love Lucy in the kitchen!

I had five, 13-gallon trash bags filled with stuff when I was done. I honestly cannot believe there was that much stuff. That’s not totally filled, mind you. I just made them as heavy as they could be without splitting; a couple were only half-full, as jars of stuff are heavy. By the time I was done, there was almost nothing left in my fridge. But what was left was well organized and in-date and low-carb.

I recently cleaned out and organized my freezer too (it’s a side-by-side), so I felt pretty good about this being done.

I closed the fridge, sat back on a folding chair I’d been using for the job, and considered my kitchen.

*

I have incredibly little counter space. Not counting one fairly unusable (because it’s sorta unreachable) corner, I have about 2′, ~5′, 2′ (three separate counter areas). These have to hold my canisters and other things that sit on counters, coffeepot, all my non-refrigerated bottles of stuff (vinegar, etc.), dish drainer, and dirty dishes (I don’t have a dishwasher), and so on. So by the time we’re talking about useable counter space, there isn’t much. There’s enough to make a meal just fine, except if I don’t clean everything up really well, or I take up a couple feet with dishes needing washed, the next meal has no place to do anything. I mourn this regularly.

Idly looking around, I realized (I knew this, but suddenly realized this in a new way somehow), that I have, count them, three substantial, nice looking sets of clear canisters. (Lovely cubic thick glass ones, spherical lucite ones, and plastic lock&locks.) Every counter in my kitchen is missing the back 8″ as a result.

I considered them anew. Most their contents date from–I am not kidding–the year 2000. Think it might be time to get rid of that stuff eh! If I haven’t used it by now, I’m definitely not going to be using it anytime soon–and being 8 years old, I don’t think I want to use it, airtight canisters or not.

I considered various strategies to consolidate anything useful from the newer l&l’s and spice shelf into the prettiest glass ones, use the l&l’s for leftover/ freezer storage, and do something elsewhere with the lucite ones. This one step alone would buy me several feet of 8″ back-of-counter space freed up.

Then I considered that on the small counter next to the fridge, half of the 2′ space is taken up with bottles of stuff — oils, soy sauce, vinegar, etc. It took me awhile to get the niggling in the back of my head up to the front, where it pointed out that (a) I haven’t used more than a few of these bottles in at least two years, (b) nearly everything there is either highcarb, bad for me (like veg oils), or possibly should have been refrigerated anyway, and (c) was another perfect example, like my fridge, of (1) good stuff getting lost in the shuffle, and (2) me using valuable space in my life to store crap I don’t use, don’t want, and don’t care about. This would free up not only the other foot of that counter, but that newly combined space would be a space big enough to actually work in for something like a mixing bowl or chopping mat.

I thought, so really, here I am sorta chronically sad about how pitiful my situation with counter space is, and yet, there is a solution in several areas, and it’s really my own fault the situation IS what it IS: if I simply arranged things differently, the situation would be a whole lot better.

It was sort of disconcerting to think I’ve been bitching about having no counter space for years, and yet, I seem to have pointedly made the problem worse. And somehow, didn’t notice.

Like I sort-of-observed, but didn’t become “fully” aware of in a deep way, my obesity for so long.

In an upper cupboard on the second shelf I have glasses I can barely reach. Over on another cupboard the second shelf is filled with pyrex baking pans that somehow didn’t make it over to the hanging pot rack shelf and take up space I wish I had for other stuff. And the most reachable lower-top cupboard is filled with cups–most of them too small to be useful, typical coffee cups, most of them cheap and cheesy, mismatched stuff I’m not even sure where I got. Why can’t I just buy a 6-set of nice, good-sized mugs? Why have a cupboard totally over-filled with ugly crap that’s too small?

As my boyfriend pointed out, based on organizing his own kitchen, having tons of cheap dishes does little but crowd the good ones and allow you to make such a mess of your kitchen before you have to break down and clean it that it becomes monumental.

Under the first tiny counter there is a ‘corner’ cupboard. I don’t drop & kneel as easily as the average person, so I only use the front; it’s hard to see let alone reach anything farther back. It was looking kinda frenzied. There’s probably 150 cheap storage-container lids there… and no containers. My weekly housekeeping help seems to throw them away, unless pixies are stealing them in the night. I’ve told her she can do that if something is really gross. Apparently many things fit this description. Given my refrigerator, I realize she probably has a point.

I looked closer into the murky depths and realized I have 3 nested metal mixing bowls in there. I forgot those even existed! And I really could have used them recently. It occurred to me all the crappy stuff I can’t use is front and center, and useful things are out of sight, out of mind.

I wondered if that was some analogy to my life. Like how all the trivial crap takes up my daily time, while the fairly important stuff, like prayer, meditation, music, writing, working out, etc. get shoved to the back of my life and forgotten in the shuffle.

*

I looked at this white wall-unit (bookshelf) I have in the kitchen. It’s the most handy, accessible thing in the whole little square kitchen. It’s filled with (white) appliances. Which, when organized, looks kinda neat. But as I eyed it critically, it occurred to me nearly everything on it I almost never use. A couple I’ve never used, like the ice cream maker and extra bowl, or the belgian waffle iron. The yogurt maker I used twice. The dehydrator, never yet though I hope so still. The big popcorn maker I can’t use now that I’m LC but don’t want to get rid of (yet).

I looked closer and saw that the MP3/CD/Radio I’ve been looking for going on two months now, was actually stacked/ buried underneath a regular-sized waffle iron on the bottom shelf. And as I sat there looking at it with “new” eyes, I realized that while things I need (like glasses) are hard to reach, stuff I almost never use sits in the most prime real estate of the room.

Again, I surrounded myself with what I didn’t need, while pushing what I did need back to inconvenience.

The impact of my whole kitchen hit me. I thought: It hasn’t changed much in two years. Why am I just now noticing that it is not structured to support me?

I saw that in some respects, this is an analogy to what I was just blogging about: I have seen it, I have been consciously aware of it, but as my boyfriend pointed out, I hadn’t “seen the forest for the trees”: the larger pattern and its import hadn’t hit me until just now.

*

He and I were talking about something the other night and this really fits into it. Sometimes, it’s like each individual little thing seems like no big deal. Inconveniences with my coffeemaker and my knife block and other things, I just deal with, because they are such trivia, so what. Tons of things. But none are important. None are a big deal.

And yet when you combine all those trivia into one situation, you get this BIG situational pattern that is amazing and eventually, when you realize the scope of it, you have to admit it’s untenable: you can’t stand it anymore. You realize the situation is now “ridiculous” and “overwhelming” and frankly dysfunctional and things have got to change.

Things that are fine one trivia at a time, are not fine en masse.

*

They say frogs won’t notice they’re boiling if the water gets hot gradually. Things pile up gradually. Inconveniences multiply gradually. Weird shit stuffed in cupboards and under things breeds and multiplies until it’s frankly astounding how much STUFF you can find in every imaginable area. Because it happens gradually. You see it, but it doesn’t sink it. Then one day you see the whole pattern and it does.

Why do we let it go? It’s not just ‘things’, it’s ’situations’. How many times have I seen a situation a friend is in and thought, “I would never put up with that.” Whether it’s the behavior of a spouse or boss or child, or whatever. But you know, they probably didn’t start putting up with that. First it was just one little thing. Then another. Until it snowballed into a ridiculous and even dysfunctional situation. But it boiled my friend by surprise because the increase was gradual. I’ve had my share of boilings myself, of course.

If we had more here-now focus, more sense of self, would we be more inclined to nip inconveniences in the bud, rather than just deal with it?

And while I’m at it, what kind of logic is, “It’s ok, it won’t kill me.” WTF? So what if it won’t kill you, neither will arsenic in small doses, does that justify any given thing being tolerated?!

Kinda reminds me of that digitally animated movie A Bug’s Life. The grasshoppers at a bar are joking about, what kind of harm can one crazy disgruntled ant do? And their leader, Hopper, says something like, You’re right, and he tossed a seed in the air as if it represented an ant, what harm can an ant be? And laughed with them–and then angrily yanked open this chute and utterly buries them in these seeds. He says the issue with ants is numbers, which makes it a serious issue indeed, even if their comparative size/strength individually is not.

His point: if you don’t deal with the single issues as they arise, someday you’ll have an army of issues to deal with all at once, and that’ll be a lot harder to deal with.

Well in a way this perfectly describes “clutter” and “inconvenience” (and other things — from relationships to kitchens to fat cells to whatever). We let any number of minor things and inconveniences bug us because it seems like more trouble to stress on solving it than just to accept that it won’t kill us.

(Yes, I know I’m using the bad guy in an animated film for my philosophy, but stay with me here. I grew up on Disney, I can cry over cartoon movies and commercials, and I even liked the Bee Gees. I am not ashamed.)

• I feel that keeping all the highcarb stuff represents the things I hold onto that I not only don’t really want but know will harm me, but cling to solely because I have something invested in them.
• I feel that spaces stuffed with outdated food and bowl-less lids and such represents things I have ignored that are missing or going bad in my life.
• I feel that prime in-my-face spaces stuffed with things I don’t much use, while the things I need are nearly out of reach, represents some problem with priorities and attention, like filling my life with such busy-ness that I forget to pray or sleep enough, as one of innumerable examples.

What if, like the mystics say, we actually look at our surroundings as extensions of ourselves?

What if we actually expect that everything we have we should love, and if we don’t love it (figuratively speaking here), we should give it away, not keep it prisoner in an environment where it is not utilized or respected? This goes for situations, not just things.

*

As for the sheer amount of stuff around me:

Sometimes I feel like every single item/object in a room is taking some tiny little piece of my attention just by existing in proximity.

When I’m in very minimalist rooms with a sense of space, I tend to be more creative, more relaxed, and feel rather like more (a larger %) of my “awareness of inner self” is available, since it is not busy with my external surroundings, and not numbed and distracted by the sheer quantity of them.

And every item that is messy, out of place, uninteresting, unwanted, broken, mismatched, etc. seems to add just a little bit of darkness to the mix.

There’s a reason magazine ads show large open rooms with lots of light and space. It feels good, psychologically.

So I live in a small dark box some bad architect in the 1950s designed to build cheap. I can deal. But nearly everything I have to gripe about inside my house is something that I can change, and more importantly, something that often, I’ve made far worse than it was to begin with, or ignored for years, or seriously failed to make even the smallest intelligent decision to resolve.

Apparently the real problem wasn’t my dim and boxy little house, it was me.

And it’s not that I suddenly have a problem. It’s that I had a problem paying attention to the little things when they began eons ago, and went into denial of the big things when they finally manifested quite some time ago, until I just “woke up” one day recently and said, “Hold up here! I’ve had an unfinished painting job and no cupboard doors for years now! WTF is wrong with me? That’s ridiculous! Solve that right now!”

*

So tonight I did the fridge. Tomorrow I’m doing the canisters and the bottles on the counter. By Friday I should have more counter space and convenience than I’ve ever had here in eight years.

The important thing is this: It was always there. The opportunity and option was always present. It is merely my lack of attention, intention, whatever, that kept me from observing it, seizing it, and doing something about it.

Every problem I thought of while looking around my kitchen, I realized there was a solution for. All I’ve seen for years is a kitchen of problems. All I saw tonight was a kitchen filled with answers, and potential too long ignored and badly managed by me.

Maybe that’s a lot of my life, too. My health, body/mind/spirit, has no problem for which it does not also have at least one solution. The question is, will I look for it properly, with the open mind to find it? Will I recognize the need to bother looking in the first place? Will I put forth the effort to make it work once I see?

I have a great kitchen, really, despite how bad off it is now and how much I’ve complained about it — and I have a great body, really, despite the same general situation. Both are over-stuffed, disorganized, unfinished and badly treated. But they have great potential, and if I treat things well and regularly make an effort, both might turn out to be better than I ever dared hope for.

*

Some people use church, ancient philosophers, or psychotherapists for analysis. Tonight, I used my kitchen. Make use of the tools at hand. :-)

PJ

I admit it: I deal poorly with failure. You’d think I’d have adapted by now. That by this age of 42, I’d have evolved some kind of gentle but firm, persistent discipline that my friends have so often had. I so admire that. I sometimes think the people I’ve chosen as friends have often been people with the qualities I most lacked.

This is an odd thing to admit–and will just make me sound like an egotist–but I was blessed, or maybe it’s cursed, with a seeming gift for naturally acquiring skills. Just about anything I’ve ever wanted to do in my life, I decided to do, and it turned out I was pretty talented in that area. From sports to music to intellectual topics to creativity of many kinds, it didn’t matter. It’s always just been a given.

When I was 12 at the skating rink they made me race the 18 year olds and start halfway back the rink and I still beat them. When I was in 5th grade my teacher used my SAT scores to talk with the class about ‘potential’ because I’d scored at college level in every area (I think Math was slightly lower). (Irony: I nearly failed 5th grade. My mom died late the year before and I wasn’t real happy then.) In high school I read the textbooks the first couple days, aced most the tests the rest of the year that were based on it, to the fury of my friends who studied and did more poorly, and I read science fiction the rest of the time. (Not surprisingly, I nearly failed most of high school, too.)

When I decided to teach myself guitar as a teen, my friends, who’d had years of lessons and were working on the same music I was, practiced daily in earnest. I played around for 15 minutes, ignored it for a week, and was better than them by the next weekend, as if my subconscious were working on it. They’d get furious at me, at how unfair it was. They were right: it was. When I decided to enter the local (today they’d call it “Indie”) scene with my original music, people were so ridiculously nice to me I kept looking at them suspiciously. Musicians better than I’ll ever be would just unfold from the woodwork to talk with me and play with me and invite me to stuff. From trivial skills like soul-train dancing as a kid to more useful stuff like subtle language skills for hypnosis/NLP, to a long list of business skills and insert-anything-here, I’ve had it remarkably easy in life.

My life has been significantly difficult in other areas. Maybe the universe is compensating.

And so… I didn’t learn to practice. I didn’t learn much discipline. I didn’t learn anything about persistence. And because anything I bothered trying to do, I did well with remarkably little effort–and I didn’t do things that I wasn’t good at I suspect, and didn’t need to since I had plenty of other choices–I never learned to deal with failure.

*

When I gained a couple hundred pounds quickly, and dieting by the high-carb standard didn’t do anything for me (except make me so miserable I didn’t think I could survive it), I was at a loss. I was 24 and for the first time in my life I had utterly and completely failed. Not only had I become terminally uncool — so much that the career in music I planned since I was 5, my hundreds of songs in a binder from the time I was a teen, were all for nought — but then as if to nail that case closed, my diet efforts failed abysmally to change it.

I didn’t know what to do to fix it. I did everything by the book, hard and perfectionist, and failed. Given no female in my mom’s family had successfully avoided being huge, I figured that was it, I was doomed. Baffled by my failure, and having no idea how to handle it, I went another way: after deciding (barely) not to shoot myself, I just immersed myself in my work and personal interests–generally those which did not require being physically seen by another human being.

*

There is a thing sometimes called state-specific consciousness that refers to memory being associated with certain states of mind. For example, if in one state of mind you had experience A and learned skill B, then for some people, in a different state of mind, they might have a fairly minimal grasp of that memory and skill–but if they shift their state of mind back to where they were ‘present’ when those experiences happened and skills developed, the memories and skills are fully accessible to them. It’s a bit of a phenomenon.

I’m a high hypnotic and I’ve got a good deal of this. Half of what I’ve done through my adult professional life I probably couldn’t do today, without regressing to a mental state much like I had when I did that work (by imagining myself in that situation/etc.), and I assume that as usual, I’d pick up the memories and skills again. In some areas of my personal life — including my obesity — this has an odd way of surprising me.

(Aside from that: there is a TV show called The Pretender that I always felt was a more-advanced version of some innate skill humans have access to, and that’s like a secondary part of the phenomenon: the ability to put oneself in a state of mind that is so highly ‘receptive’ to every kind of subtle information, memory and more, that one can do more than the objective time/info-invested would imply they should be able to. Some would call this psychic; others would just consider it having access to a vast database of mnemonic, subconscious information.)

*

I recently attempted some half-squats, and had dismal luck with them. I’m sure with something firmer to hold onto I will do ok. I can do a full squat but my knees feel terror. (Literally, and speaking of ‘phenomena’: the sense I have is that the fear is felt by my knees, not my head for my knees. Odd!)

I was SO ANGRY that I couldn’t just DO it, that I ended up just stomping out, this was days aog, and haven’t gone back to my weights room since.

Because: I really have a problem with failure.

I just need to accept that I am not a 19 year old tennis playing windsurfing judo throwing California girl fashion zombie performer anymore… I am a 42 year old mega-morbidly obese midwestern mom now. It just keeps pissing me off!

So the reasonable question is: If you’re 42 years old, and you’ve been insanely fat for nigh on 20 years, why aren’t you used to it already? Why is a full mirror or store window a ghastly, horrifying shock? Why is who and what you are now surprising in any way? What part of the last 20 years didn’t prepare you for your condition of today?

*

The reality is that I have deliberately paid so little attention to myself for the last 20 years that it seems like there was the me that was ‘aware’ all that time ago, and then the me that is just waking up to being more aware of myself today… as if the 20 years in the middle, in terms of my perception of self, have been bizarrely condensed into a few weeks of moments of attention separated by long duration periods of denial.

So now that I am finally “paying attention to myself” more, it feels like, “Whoa, what the — what?! You have GOT to be kidding me!”

I can’t believe I can’t do a squat. I can’t believe that my eight pound dumbbell weights are plenty. I can’t believe I wear a 5x (if slightly stretchy) pants size. I can’t believe that horrible image in the pictures is me. I can’t believe that reflection in the store window is me. I am stunned, even dumbfounded at times, as if I woke up one day in the body of someone different, and the dreams got me used to life and the history, but the conscious self is completely unadapted to my new reality.

Because I quit paying attention. When I realized (or believed) that I could not change my weight, that I could not salvage the future I planned until then, that I could not bear the horrible fact of my rather swift and profound obesity, the ghastly spectre of it overwhelmed me, and I just . . . tuned out.

And so, the realization, and the frustration, and the coming-to-terms, that I should have done at the age of 24, I am now doing at the age of 42.

And despite that I consciously understand my condition–I don’t even try to run, for example–still, the dominant part of me thinks that I should be as tough and athletic as I was last time I knew me–last time I was paying attention.

That part of me thinks that it ought to be easy, like everything used to be. That I ought to be able to go in there and lift weights, or whatever else I might want to do, and do very well with it. That I should pick an intelligent eating plan like the one Regina outlined and within days, weeks, months, be the poster child for nutritional good sense as a result.

*

I am regularly amazed that eating low carb, AND eating healthily, AND getting exercise, are only easy until they are hard. Too often so far, on the day something gets hard, I quit doing it. Because somehow I have managed to so effortlessly be good at things throughout my life, that I haven’t developed the persistent discipline you’d expect from a well-raised farm boy of 10.

So I am also learning, as if I am a small child, about staying with something that is hard. Aside from the business environment (where all those adaptive traits abound in me for some reason, probably for the same reason other skills come easy), I haven’t got that trait in my personal life yet.

I’m learning about having to work at something, like my friends did. About having to be persistent, and having to deal with failure — repeatedly — and pick myself up, dust off my butt and get back to what I know I want to be doing.

*

The good news is, low-carb has given me a doorway to success. There was no hope, I thought, all those years ago. There was no point to trying, or to paying attention to myself, if it was hopeless. I used to say, “Only optimists kill themselves. Pessimists aren’t surprised their life sucks.” I was pessimistic enough about the outlook of my obesity to turn my attention elsewhere, to something I thought I could make a difference with, which was “anything but my body”.

Maybe for men looking to lose 20 pounds, lowcarb is a quick fix. But for someone starting huge, even the best eating plan in the world is going to be a very long term effort to lose that extra weight–and it’s entirely possible that it will never fully come off. As a result, the “persistence for the long term” becomes more critical in someone like me. Anybody can do some-big-deal for a limited duration. But for the morbidly obese (and diabetic), the lowcarb eating plan is a rest-of-your-life thing.

Lowcarb isn’t really a wagon to fall off. There is only one true failure point in low carb eating: when you die. Until then, you have another day, another meal, another hour, another chance to do it right, to drag up the energy to eat well enough to feel well enough to move well enough to lose well enough to change your life. You gotta start somewhere. For some of us it’s a lot higher than others.

But no matter the reason someone eats lowcarb, one truism exists: on lowcarb ketogenic, the eating part is the easy part. It’s the wrapping your head around yourself and where you really are and all the changes you go through, that merely attempting to lose weight (let alone succeeding!) bring on.

It doesn’t come fast. It doesn’t come without a monumental learning curve about nutrition and metabolism and your own unique body–and mind. It’s a long hard road, and it takes persistence — and the ability to deal with occasional failure in one respect or another — to succeed.

It doesn’t come easy. But it comes.

I’m a bred consumer. I have this on good authority, from my ex-husband who grew up in Czech under the communists. I admit it. I was raised with wanting-stuff indoctrinated into my tiny little brain. I know this must be so, because when my life goes completely wrong, my plans to dig myself out of that hole invariably include some shiny toy or appliance that will help me change my life.

I could use dumbells and cinderblocks, but I’d rather dream of Soloflex. You get the idea. I see those commercials with pumping big-drama music as sweat and shadows play on someone’s perfect and tanned muscles and little stars enter my eyes like a disney cartoon character. It’s a good thing I don’t have TV anymore. I’d be even more broke than I already am.

It reminds me of the time my little girl saw a pair of high heeled all-lucite shoes. They looked like some kind of shiny princess shoe from a fairy tale. She tried to use my visa to buy it online. Fortunately I found this out as she’d mucked up the effort — too young to know how, and the company understood. I wanted to be mad at her, but when I saw them, I just couldn’t help but understood how this had probably affected her brain.

So on the endless list of ridiculous toys that I totally don’t need but decided to spend my precious money on anyway, this month we had: the hamburger patty press and papers.

Yes, it’s true. I spent money on a piece of plastic that probably cost 4 cents in china to manufacture, all so that I could make something by hand with a tool rather than making it by hand with my hands.

But oddly enough, it inspired me a little more than doing it by hand seems to.

And it packs them densely so they are easier to handle in storing and cooking.

And I can spice the burger in a big bowl first so they taste better.

And it’s a lot faster and way less messy when making burger than doing it on the spot.

And it stores more easily due to consistent size.

And since they’re consistent the cooking time is always the same.

And they’re a nice size for dropping a slice of cheese over the top.

And I know exactly how many burgers I’ll get out a given package of burger.

The burger doesn’t stick to the press (as I worried). The papers are a few bucks for 1000, more than I might ever use. It’s easy to wash.

I’m on a new wave of effort to EAT MEAT. While I realize burger is possibly the worst on the list, it’s what I can afford and I’m just going to start sucking down fish oil to work on those Omega-3s. Being able to quickly cook something to eat gives a much higher probability I will eat at all.

**

I’ve had a lousy week for some reason. More emotional than anything, although I think that doing a few highcarb days just as I’d hit ketosis and then dropping back to LC did not help AT ALL (my poor body). I’m so glad the week is over!!

This weekend I hope to do lots of ‘oopsie roll’ experiments, savory and sweet. Then maybe we could have hamburgers ON something.

June is usually a buggy month.

The cats go out till Oct-Nov because otherwise the flea situation KILLS ME.

And a ton of things start “bugging me” about my life that didn’t before, probably because there is finally enough consistent light outside that I drag my sorry butt out of its D3-deprived state and start caring more about my life again.

As you know, I love plans. Making them… watching them crash and burn… looking back on them sorrowfully… that’s me!

I’m a few days early this year, but it’s June Bug time: time to take a serious look at my summer plans and “the rest of the year”. And it’s time for my summer BIG PLAN!

I’ve come to a few conclusions recently about my eating plan. Such as:

1. It is more important to develop a healthy habit, than to do anything perfectly according to any numbered plan.

2. It is more important to do something consistently, than to do something perfectly sometimes, and terribly other times.

3. It is more important to better-establish a healthy lifestyle, than to lose any specific number of pounds.

Because if those three things are worked on, stuff like “losing fat” and “becoming more active” are inexorably inevitable.

I have a list of goals to meet between now and the end of the year:

1. Eat vegetables regularly.
2. Take supplements.
3. Drink more water.
4. Exercise more.

The only thing that has a specific goal-measure on it is this one:

5. Lose 30#

That is less than 1 lb a week. Which at my weight certainly ought to be do-able.

I’ve lost a whole lot of weight fast in the past when I bothered really trying for any consistent period. It’s combining the ‘intensity’ with the ‘longevity’ of an eating plan that gets difficult for me. I’m a sprinter, not a cross-country sort. I can do most anything briefly — and the more extreme, the better — but sane balanced approaches, even in the short term let alone the long term, are hard work for me.

The last year I’ve been “off and on” lowcarb, to the degree that I weigh about the same as I did in 1/07 (maybe 20# lighter) — but then, I haven’t gained anything, so that’s good! I guess I’ve been ‘on’ again just enough to balance the ‘off’ agains.

But as you know, it’s still depressing to look back on a long period of time and think, “How much healthier would I be right now if I’d actually got off my butt and been proactive about this?!”

THE VEGGIE DILEMMA

Eating veggies has turned out to be harder than I thought. Aside from bell peppers (and those, more ‘in’ things than on their own), it turns out most the things I like aren’t veggies! Onions and mushrooms are alliums and fungi. Peas are starchy, but even if I take the carb hit, they’re legumes. I didn’t eat veggies growing up and have little taste for them. I sometimes like broccoli in stir-fry. Tomatoes in small dose. I don’t like salad unless it’s buried in blue cheese dressing, although I can tolerate greek salad (which is tossed with feta cheese).

So eating “3 cups a day of veggies” as Regina recommended (you may recall I’m following the eating goals she outlined for me–or I should be, anyway!) turned out to be a real pain in the butt for me. She suggests, ever the sensible one, that eating whatever I can veggie-wise is better than giving up on it entirely. Still. I didn’t expect it to be such work!

Humor: the USDA’s “food pyramid” website — not that this isn’t the most moronic contribution to diet in history since cult koolaid anyway — can’t even get straight what is a fruit, vegetable, legume, etc. It’s just embarrassing.

I’m falling behind in the required physical work of my life: near-constant lawn mowing, the backyard is a jungle needing several things before mowing can happen, the garden apparently had 2.7 billion weed seeds in the soil as the minute it started raining, the weeds were so high and thick I’m sure my seedlings are dying of shade, I still haven’t finished shoveling potting soil from the dumptruck, and so on. I haven’t been getting enough protein which I’m sure is part of not feeling “up to” more than I have lately, but that is changing.

SO I WENT SHOPPING.

I bought meat, meat, meat, and meat. While there I also bought a little bit of cheese and some fairly LC jarred sauces. I didn’t have room at the time but am going back tonight or tomorrow to buy produce, soon as I figure out what to do with it.

I also bought the 5000 IU capsules of Vitamin D from the proteinpower.com website where, interestingly enough, I went LAST, but I could hardly find any elsewhere and they cost more when I did. I’m going to use that the rest of the year and see if I feel any difference as a result. I’m light-olive complexion (the hint of cherokee in my ~14 nationalities) and grew up in a beach city so I suspect I’m probably chronically low on D3.

DA KIDDO!

The kid is on this eating plan with me! She’ll be 12 in August. This is a pic of her wearing my vastly oversized- on- her sweatshirt at the walking park a few weeks ago.

Well that’s all I have to report for now. I’m a day late posting on my exercise blog, gotta do that tomorrow with my initial measures and counts of what I can lift and do for exercise. I’ll be doing chair-based half-squats until I am finally light enough that my knees can stand full squats.

LOWCARB SOCIAL LIFE

I recommend folks who want friends to learn with or hang with others, seek out the social forums for lowcarb, such as lowcarber.org, lowcarbfriends.com, etc. I don’t know what I’d do without my journal buddies, who put up with all my kvetching about everything in life, all my Mad Scientist plans and experiments, etc.

Hope y’all are having a good early summer! And marshmallow, wherever you are, I lost your forum address, if you’d be so kind as to resend!

I knew I needed to get up and do some raking and mow part of the backyard lawn, and maybe all of the front again. It’s spring, the rain makes it grow like crazy. I was procrastinating. Just as I decided to do it, the phone rang. And a good thing I was lazy, because I wouldn’t have heard it or answered it while mowing.

I yelled to the kid and she and I ran to the car, speeding five blocks away to my parents’ house. Moments after we arrived, the local siren started screaming (signifying a twister has been seen within or from the city limits). Then we spent the next while underground, watching out the top of an open tornado shelter as clouds raced across the sky at truly incredible rates and the siren keened.

In the end, it missed us by just a few miles, literally annihilating the tiny town right next door (Picher), as part of a 1/2 mile wide, 90 mile long swath of destruction.

Which meant I didn’t get the damn lawn mowed.

Which is really pretty insignificant next to the damage, injuries and deaths all around, obviously.

It’s a little surreal when you see stuff on the national news that you just drove by on Tuesday and you realize “Hey, that small pile of boards was the school,” or, “Hey, that big block of nothingness seen from the helicopter was the housing tract where Jim lives. Er, lived.”

Rather like the winter ice storm that destroyed nearly every tree at about 18 feet and higher, making the whole town look like a war zone somehow, this has a weird psychological effect on the local onlookers. Me, at least.

***

I was browsing one of the lowcarb forums recently, and one thread was talking about things we don’t do because we’re fat. No, I don’t mean because we can’t do them, I mean because we’re embarrassed to do them — to be seen. The social horror is a more potent threat to stay inside for many than an armed curfew guard in a war zone.

Since I lost some weight, though I’m still ridiculously fat, my perception of myself has changed a little. Sure, I’m still ashamed to exist in some social respects, because having been brainwashed by the same skinny-white culturally retarded meme as the rest of North America, the reptilian part of my little tiny brain thinks that’s what I should be. I’m neither skinny (at all) nor white (much) so it’s pretty irritating that my brain got washed with that just as well as anybody else’s.

But on the whole, my willingness to be seen has increased slightly, recently. This is in part because for the first time ever, after lowcarbing and losing some weight, I:

1. Got shoes. Don’t laugh; I’d been wearing generally house slippers or thongs for years, zero foot support for a person who desperately needs it more than most, because I couldn’t find shoes I fit into. The ladies in my LC journal told me that men’s shoes have a ‘wider toe-box’ than women’s and to try that, and what do you know–I had my first pair of tennis shoes ever. Lost weight, and more weight, and now I can go to payless and slip on a pair of size 10. (I’m 8 1/2 US when normal weight.) I like the VANS-style slip-on shoes and mostly wear those. Call it stupid, but actually being able to walk comfortably has made a big difference for me.

2. Got pants. I hadn’t been able to fit in any form of pants for years, and wore skirts, usually 2-3 of them layered, instead. Skirts are no fun in wet weather, in sub-freezing weather (especially if you don’t have underwear that fit…)–I think you get the idea–or when mowing a high lawn filled with bugs… sigh. But I was able to get into a 6x, and then–less gracefully, but they stretch a bit and become loose and work fine, into a 5x–of Junonia’s “cargo pants”, which are almost, not quite, like “real” pants, something I hadn’t seen since on my hips since my early 20’s.

3. Had a day where I was unusually, deeply humiliated on the very busy street I live on. To begin with, I was already horribly embarrassed to be outside without my normal long-tent-shirt. These go from neck to knees like a giant bag preventing any onlooker from the ghastly spectre of any possible detail of my obesity. On top of that, I was trying to start a pull-cord lawnmower, which means I was also bent over with my back end sticking out and my whole body shaking wildly from the effort. I’m relatively certain it was a horrible sight to behold, and there may be passing drivers still waking up in a cold sweat from the memory. My mortification at this only added to my rage that I couldn’t get it started. But as a bizarre side effect, later on, I felt rather like I’d had the worst possible exposure issue AND SURVIVED.

And suddenly I just cared a whole lot less. I actually wore pants WITHOUT the tent-shirt to the store. And then to another store.

Nobody fainted in the produce aisle. Small children did not wail in fear. The devil-child cheerleaders of high school did not manifest like the Ghosts of my Social Outcast Past to mock me for my Levi 501’s, let alone for the current size of my butt (you never know when those cute blonde horrors are going to crop up in some public place to test your coronary health).

And after a few days I realized that instead of wearing sandles and 2 skirts, I was wearing comfortable shoes and pants. And instead of wearing sleeves and multiple layers on hot days, or skirts and sandles on snow days, I’m actually dressed sanely for the climate.

It’s really astounding how much more willing to MOVE I am, and to spontaneously do things like run out to the backyard to do a little weeding for ten minutes, or run to the store for something, or run out to the car to get the book I forgot, or grab a rake and work on the front yard while I happen to be out on the front porch anyway, when I am physically comfortable and don’t feel quite so mortified as I did before. I feel as if I am getting so much more exercise in a million small ways.

Do people still look at me with that “don’t- look- at- her- it’s- rude” evasion or the “good- god- imagine- how- many- bonbons- she- must- eat- to- be- that- fat” response? Absolutely. Do I care? Not nearly as much as I did.

You know what? I’m fat. There is no hiding it. There is no clothing, no careful posing position, no tent-like covering, that is going to fool anybody within 2 states of me into thinking I am a normal size. No matter how many layers or tents I wear, no matter how many bland and dark colors I wear, nobody is ever, not for an instant, going to NOT NOTICE that I am ABSOLUTELY HUGE.

So get the hell over it, you know? Ya don’t like it, don’t look.

While I’m not to the bathing suit in public without something over me stage yet, I am at least to the “pants and tank top while mowing on a busy street” stage. I am going out in public dressed like — I mean, acting like — I mean, ALMOST like — Gasp! –

A normal person.

***

I think I’ve lost count years ago of the things I would have liked to have done with my little girl but didn’t, because I was embarrassed; because people would look at me that way, with that revulsion, rejection, disgust, avoidance, etc.

So we didn’t go bowling, or to the pool, or any number of other things we could have done. If I couldn’t sit in the car or lurk on a bench (replete in 3 skirts and a tent…), I didn’t do it.

She’s nearly 12 now. We still have a great relationship, but she is heading into the teenage years. How much longer will my little girl trust me implicitly? How much longer will she want to go bowling with mom? She isn’t a “little” girl anymore.

Today I was thinking, and then what?

What if I’d been killed by a tornado, by anything from an act of god to an act of stupidity to a side effect of a lifetime of lousy eating? If I died tomorrow, what brave adventures would I have lived? And how would my kid remember me?

I was the person not courageous enough to do any number of things because I worried about what people would say or how they would look at me or even treat me.

I was the person who sat in too many clothes in a hot car in the sun watching while my kid swam because there was no place to sit in the pool area and I couldn’t go in.

I was the person who sat around with a computer rather than doing any number of things with the people around me I loved, because they would require being around other people I didn’t love who would look at me wrong.

You know, you, me… anyone could walk out of here and get killed by some drunk in a pickup. I could slip in the shower and break my neck. When your number’s up, it’s up.

from “The Zero Effect”

It used to be that black people had to sit at the back of the bus. But you know, severely fat people can’t even get ON the damn bus. They don’t or barely fit in the seats, they can’t or barely (sideways) fit down the aisles, and there’s not even a contingent of their own people at the back, at least, waiting to welcome them as one of them: they’re just the social pariahs of a thin-for-sex- obsessed culture, and are treated poorly by every gender, age, race, and economic class.

There is no Cheers bar “where everybody knows your name;” there’s no pub where your fellows recognize and accept you for no better reason than your stubborn nose and fiery hair prove you’re one from the clans. Just about the only place to find people likely to accept you as you are is on the internet, a virtual world apart, where people on forums gather to talk like normal people to other seemingly normal people without the horrifying social-filter that in-person relations often provide.

Bizarrely enough, in a world seriously overstuffed (no pun intended) with fat people, somehow most of us manage to be alone with it. We are outcasts in our culture and sometimes even our families, and don’t have any bonding-place for our commonality aside from online.

And today I realized:

SO WHAT.

Tina is digging through the rubble for baby clothes or anything she can salvage from the trash heap that used to be her house. One woman found two sons dead. An entire town just vanished off the map. With stuff like this going on in the world every day, going on nearly in your own neighborhood, how can obsessing on the LITTLE STUFF like how other people treat you, seem to matter in the slightest anymore?

The whole “comparative scale of what matters” suddenly seems different to me. My God. The “social rejection” of me for being fat seems so utterly absurd all the sudden.

Why does some bozo who doesn’t even KNOW me, looking at me with “that look”, matter more than me spending time doing something with my kid, for myself, whatever?

How many fat people get vastly less exercise because they’re too socially mortified to leave the house, or the environ doesn’t “fit” them to allow them basic things people need (chairs they fit in. bathrooms they can fit in. etc.), or they haven’t got the decent or comfortable clothing any smaller-sized person would to allow it?

I see people, normal sized, going out to kids baseball games. They drag out a lawn chair and they sit and drink beer and soda, use the restroom, or climb up on the bleachers. When you can’t climb, when you’re wearing skirts, when it’s freezing and you’ve only thongs or it’s wet and you’ve only slippers, when you don’t fit in a lawn chair, yet you need to sit vastly more than those people do given your size, you don’t go to those baseball games. Or you watch from the car 500 yards away. “Yeah, I saw you baby! That was great!” yeah… sure.

***

But who wants to die un-lived? Who wants to be remembered by their kids as the big fat woman who hid in the car or under neutral or dark colored tents?

Worse, who wants to regret what they didn’t do with their kids due to cowardice?

Why does being fat not only mean all the misery that comes with it physically, but such a social nightmare that we restrict our OWN lives?

Why the hell am I wearing tents? What, am I morally obligated to spare every other person the possible fright of seeing my fat jiggle?

Who needs some evil cultural conscience acting like the guard, telling you that jews negroes fat people aren’t allowed in this store or pool or bowling alley, if YOUR OWN BRAIN is acting out that damning voice?

Clarissa Pinkola Estes is a psychologist who wrote the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” She talked about the voices that we “internalize” until eventually we have the negative, punishing, demeaning judge and jury inside our own heads, even without our parents or schoolmates or social peers for that role. (I was surprised that I liked the book, but I did.)

People die every day all around us. Nobody knows how much life they’ve got left in this focus-reality. All we know is we are here, now. The people we love are here, now. We may not be later. They may not be later.

Maybe it’s time I quit caring so much what other people think. Maybe it’s time I did the fun things I want to do, those I can do.

It’s one thing to not be physically capable. It’s another to be a coward.

I wake up each day and say, “Thank you God, for my life.”

Maybe I should start with that, and then actually GO LIVE IT.

Eons ago I wrote a simplistic little folk song (as a teen) that ended with the line, “I was looking for a rainbow… and I found gold.”

I’ve been reading the lowcarber forum recently and it struck me:

I have learned so, so much from lowcarbing.

Ironically, only some of the things I’ve learned have much to do with the carb count of foods.

And a good dose of the things I’ve learned are about me, and my psychology, and my relationships, and a whole host of things–some of which I learned because getting healthier made me see things differently, and some of which I learned because maybe, just maybe, there is a complex web of social, psychological, mental, emotional, and physical things going on that result in a person being overweight let alone morbidly obese, so if you’re working toward weight loss or health improvement, you’re bound to stumble on some of them.

Even how I evaluate other people has changed in some respects. I actually grant some slack now when I know someone is living on a doctor-approved low-fat diet; I know they are miserable and probably feel like death warmed over. I have a lot less tolerance for people spouting their politicized pseudo-nutrition jargon at me, now that I’ve learned at least a little something about food and metabolism. I have a lot more faith in myself to “deal with” — even if it never reduces to anywhere near what I’d like in my dreams — my body. I have a lot less humiliation socially in some respects, because I’m smaller than I was, so there is a small sense of pride in that.

A couple years ago I hadn’t been able to wear anything but skirts, usually a few of them at a time layered, and thong-sandals, as I couldn’t find shoes to fit — even in the dead of winter wetness and ice I wore this. Now I wear slightly stretchy cargo pants and a tank top if I want. I just recently got to the point where I was actually brave enough to wear, get this: “pants and a shirt.” That is, WITHOUT a tent-sized knee-length long shirt over everything, no matter what the temperature, to be utterly certain I was sparing every person in visual range from the hideousness of my fat.

Back then I couldn’t stand for 60 seconds without a searing, burning, screaming back pain, and walking to the car nearly overwhelmed me, and now I can mow, and weed-eat, and rake, and shovel some garden soil. Granted, I have to rest between, but I’m wearing normal clothes and acting like a normal person… well, as normal as a weirdo like me is ever going to get, and that has nothing to do with fat haha!– the change in my life from 5/06 to 5/08 is STAGGERING.

I can’t tell you how much more I feel like doing something physical and constructive, when I can just put on normal clothes and tennis shoes and go out and do it. When I can walk without major impediment, stand without pain, do minor exercise (very minor) without instant exhaustion.

Lowcarb did that for me. But the process of doing lowcarb over time is a big part of far more than my body.

I never cooked. I’m still learning. I still have not whipped egg whites stiff or successfully and edibly cooked a whole chicken and used the bones for a follow-up soup, but that is coming. I can make a whole lot of other stuff. I can even experiment now and then and it usually comes out pretty decent. I actually feel halfway competent in the kitchen which is making me a little more courageous. Not as courageous as the fabulous Niki at O.2.B.Fit whose zillions of recipes leave me drooling, but still, in my own way, braver than I’ve ever been.

Being influenced by people like Regina at Weight of the Evidence has made me pay more attention to nutrition. I’m still alternately doing well or not-at-all on lowcarb with a nutrition angle, but I pay a lot more attention to veggies and vitamins than I ever did, and it’s gradually getting better. I sometimes wonder, if my life is so different and better two years after beginning lowcarb, what might it be like in five years?

I’m so happy to have found lowcarb.

Even when I am not ON lowcarb, I’m happy to have found it. Funny huh! Even if I am eating a Butterfinger because I’m not doing LC at the moment and feel like it, I am still not having rice for dinner or donuts for breakfast because of my concern for their carbs. I hadn’t thought about it until this morning when I realized that even when I am eating really badly, not LC at all, I still eat vastly better — much less junk and for much less duration — than I ate before I learned about LC.

Merely SEEING the Gary Taubes book on my shelf can re-invoke days of almost nothing but meat, eggs and veggies frankly, heh!

When I wake up bloated, aching, can barely move, my brain is fogged, now I think, “Need to do lowcarb at least a few days, you’ve been eating crap, that’s why you feel like crap.” It is astounding to me that I used to feel that way every single day of my life and that was NORMAL.

I’ve learned a little about people. I’ve made more women-friends through lowcarb than every other source and all the previous 40 years of my life combined, go figure–I’ve found more women “like me” in lowcarb than anywhere, and I don’t know why that is, but I’m pretty happy for it.

I hope you guys are learning more than the carb counts of foods too. I bet you are. It’s fascinating to me, in a sociology and psychology sense, how nearly every serious pursuit no matter what it is, explores a deeper and wider aspect of as individuals than it ever seemed like it would from the outside.

As you may recall (if your internet memory is long), March Madness for me was asking for “eating plan ideas” and choosing one to go forth with. There were a ton of great outlines suggested–I could have taken any one of them and been better for it–but in the end I chose one put together by Regina over at The Weight of the Evidence.

Now, this won’t come as any surprise to most of you, because I know you’re smarter than me, but since I’m eternally pollyannic about how easy everything in life should be I was shocked by the lesson:

Eating well is not the same thing as eating low-carb.

I think I confuse these, and after further reflection, I think maybe a lot of people do, at least on occasion.

Sure, I can see the extremes and recognize it. We’ve got the Kimkins variants on the Cinnamon Toothpick Diet and we can easily see that no matter how lowcarb it might be, it’s also ridiculous, unless you really want to lose all the weight your hair is taking up, which saves all that time blow-drying it in the morning anyway–surely a selling point for a variety of Eating Plans That Can Kill You.

But it’s less obvious that more ‘reasonable’ low-carb eating plans, particularly those that non-geniuses like me gradually adapt, are not necessarily healthy just because they’re low-carb. You can skip gluten and skip dairy and skip this and skip that and keep your carbs under 40 and still eat badly. I hadn’t thought about this much until now. I’d thought about it in the context of staying on an eating plan, and in the inspiration after finishing the Gary Taubes book, but hadn’t given a lot of thought to how genuinely *healthy* a given eating plan is.

It seems to me that some people–that would be ME–pay more attention to what they CAN’T have, than to what they SHOULD have.

***

Many of the skills I’ve been building for eating lowcarb over the last 18 months, go totally to waste on Regina’s plan.

Do I need low-cal? I can do that. How about low-carb? I can do that. All meat? No problem. Sixteen eggs a day? I’m on it. Yes! I can juggle protein pudding and flax seed souffle and exactly 2,197 calories per day as adjusted by a 5.2% carbohydrate limit replete with exactly 7.5 sliced black olives every day except Wednesday and track this to the gram along with my weight, my mood, my food, the weather, and the digestive habits of all 8 of my cats, in a spreadsheet with seven auxilliary workbook pages including charts, graphs, and graduated projections.

In other words, when it comes to any extreme, I do just fine.

Regina’s plan has been an educational experience–which is not to say I get any passing grade this month–and, as an ex fiance of mine used to say, “Things which are good for you are rarely pleasant”–(he meant me?)–but I have to say it’s been pretty enlightening for reasons almost unrelated to food.

What she recommended, you see, was not merely some guideline–the more extreme and bizarre the better–for food. No, just to complicate things, just to make it a head-banging challenge for me, what she primarily recommended was SANITY.

So, not surprisingly, I’ve had some real problems with it.

***

First, she recommended that I not be my rather obsessive self: that I just eat well according to the general outline and not measure everything in mass detail, not record everything in mass detail, not stand on the scale six times a day — just, you know, eat WELL and RELAX about it.

Eat well and relax about it? Who the heck can do THAT?

Now, I have approximately two settings in life: 120%, and ‘Off’. So already I was in trouble. Her plan wasn’t weird, extreme, bizarre, or hugely complicated. Those would have been easy. It was reasonable, balanced and moderate, which made it hard.

Secondly, her plan was a small to moderate amount of many things. So unlike my previous “dietary adaptations”, my tried and true approach to making lowcarb work wasn’t appropriate.

For example, my proven ability to simply eat a 4-5oz dose of super lowcarb chili verde for 36 meals in a row, which beautifully solved not only my carb number but my protein number too, that easy extreme wasn’t called for here.

At the drop of a hat I can demonstrate my ability to eat more eggs per day than a 370 lb. tree snake, but that wasn’t actually required either, since the idea was balance.

I’ve a full stock of “low carb processed foods” like protein powder, LC slimfast and puddings, but since she was recommending “real food” these weren’t needed.

In a pinch, I can even live on “low carb junk foods” like pepperoni and mozzarella nuked, but as she was recommending plain healthy food and not processed meats, plus veggies, that was out too.

This left me in the terribly uncomfortable position of actually needing to eat real food. And not just occasionally.

Despite having the divine inspiration of my friend Sarah, who somehow can make a garlic roasted chicken and asparagus sound great even for the 1,928,625th time, so far I have not got a very good handle on eating WELL.

I am very good at eating low-carb when I choose to. But eating low-carb and eating well are not necessarily the same thing. This is the big lesson for the month.

***

And then there’s the green stuff:

Regina’s eating plan built in the assumption that because I was eating real, healthy food, in no extremes, that having fibrous vegetables daily would be reasonable.

This ruled out “nuking frozen peas with a bunch of butter” as my sole veggie. And it’s not summer/fall so I can’t pawn all my veggie needs off on peppers. And alliums and fungus (garlic, onions and mushrooms) are not veggies. So…

I ate broccoli once. Doused in too much soy sauce and stir fried. I was really proud of myself. After which I felt like I had maxx’d out my veggie interest for at least a month.

When I realized I had to find a BUNCH more veggies, EVERY SINGLE DAY, the shower theme from ‘Psycho’ played in my head. I panicked. I don’t LIKE enough veggies to eat them regularly! And no burying them in 30 carbs worth of stir-fry sauce either. Good grief! What to do?!

My solution: I quit eating except at dinner. That resolved needing to worry about my vegetables 2/3 of the time, because it resolved needing to worry about anything 2/3 of the time. Of course, this obliterated all chance of meeting the daily goals of her eating plan (for obvious reasons). So it was not the appropriate response.

But it taught me, or reminded me, that this IS my common response to any sense of stress-challenge about food: I simply quit eating, often until I’m hungry enough that eventually I’ll eat anything, including bad things, but not give a rat’s butt about it by that time because I’m really hungry. When I ‘care’, when hunger is reasonable, if I don’t “feel like” eating well for some reason (whether good ones, like I don’t have the food, to bad ones, like I’m too lazy to cook), I put off eating, eventually driving myself to the other extreme. A dysfunctional, crisis-creating tendency. I’m sure this is echoed in many other areas of my life I choose to be in denial about right now.

As if this wasn’t enough, she also recommended that I take a few supplements. This would require actually getting off my butt to BOTHER. I glanced at my spreadsheets where–in previous “less relaxed” eating periods–I have tracked every detail of my low-carb obsession. I noted something:

I “intended” to take supplements basically every day since about September 2006 when I began this lowcarb effort. Out of about 550 days since, I have met this goal approximately 8 times…IF I round up.

So… while patting myself on the back because I wasn’t exceeding 30 carbs, I managed to completely overlook, in convenient denial, that I was not only failing to eat any decent veggies for the past 1.5 years, but abysmally failing to take supplements, either.

In short, I am malnutritioned, despite the fact that I’ve been obsessing on my food for most of (give or take some months off here and there) the last 1.5 years.

And this is mostly because of that easy confusion about the difference between eating LOW-CARB vs. eating WELL.

***

Next, I discovered that my personality is . . . in need of some improvement in a few places–this will not surprise many people around me who’ve griped about this for eons of course, but I’m referring to issues related to my eating plan now.

I do things in total overdrive — for limited periods. I’m a sprinter, not a long distance runner. I start super-hard, and I go way overboard on stuff, from the emotional investment to the physical discipline, and then it had better be over fairly soon because I burn out totally and lose all interest in it and walk away.

Normally in my life, here is how I handle this appropriately: I don’t. Instead, I adapt the things around me: I make a point to have too many things to do. That way, I can always be doing something to the extreme, then when I burn out on it, I do something else to the extreme, and so on down the line. Eventually I feel like doing one of the earlier things again.

When you take all the “extreme” and all the “didn’t do it at all” and put them together, you end up with what SEEMS like, from the outside, a consistent, normal progress. But it really isn’t. It’s more like bouncing off the extremes, and “the average in the middle looks good on paper.”

This works fine for programming; I’m a code hack at 3am for a week sometimes and don’t even look at it for the next 3 weeks. It works fine for a surprising number of things. It does not, however, work very well for “a sane eating plan.”

Also, it creates an interesting–if annoying–side-effect: it means that either I am obsessing on something or I am not doing it at all.

So, per instructions, I did not obsess on March’s eating plan.

Which is to say, that a good deal of the time, I didn’t do it at all.

Apparently this is now my eating plan for April too. And for every month until I GET IT RIGHT for at least a month, because now it’s a matter of honor. Not to mention a matter of health!

***

I know that every reasonable person reading this is thinking, “Why is it so hard to be reasonable? Why not just be sane, moderate, balanced, appropriate, and have meat and veggies at nearly every meal?”

I don’t know why it’s so hard. Maybe my extreme personality is one reason I got so fat in the first place–my ability to eat nothing at all followed by overeating carbs bigtime, during extreme phases of overwork, overstress, and sleep deprivation–that’s the formula that did a fantastic job making me gigantic in a surprisingly short time.

But this is a life-wide personality issue, not just a food issue. This affects everything in my world, from gardening to motherhood, from friends to online projects. Somewhere in the back of my head, my father’s voice is lecturing me about priorities.

***

So all together, adding up my last month of experience, here is my result:

1. I failed 90% of the time at eating veggies. On the other hand, 10% of the veggies was more than I usually have, so I have to give myself some slack for that. Maybe next month I can increase the %, even if not perfect yet.

2. I failed 99% at taking supplements. This is some kind of passive aggressive, mind bogglingly lazy or in-denial thing, so I’ve got no excuse for it except that I sucked and I obviously need work in this area.

3. I did well at eating mostly protein, but much of the time I didn’t eat enough, because I was so busy avoiding the fact that I couldn’t eat perfectly at every meal that I skipped 2/3 of my meals. Obviously one can’t eat well if they’re not eating.

4. I ate more dairy (in cheese form) than I was supposed to, mostly on the days when I was living on tacos (let’s just not go there ok), but I ate LESS dairy than I normally do, so that is an improvement I think.

5. I ate ‘a few’ organic things, not many. There are not many available to me easily and most are way expensive, and I often have a hard enough time with ordinary food costs for lowcarb let alone organic stuff. But a few is better than none and maybe I can continue the search for more of the stuff.

6. I ate off plan a few times–sweet things. I don’t normally crave sweets. I think going without food for too many meals, combined with PMS, and probably typical low O2 from sleeping (I don’t wear the apnea mask I should), resulted in a desperate need for energy. When I want ‘junk’ I usually crave bread-carbs, not sugar-carbs; sugar almost always means my body feels critically under-energy’d. I attribute this in part to not eating sufficient protein, not eating, and not taking supplements, any one of which would probably have prevented the problem. So, I’ll work on doing better.

***

I think her eating plan is eminently reasonable, extremely healthy, and well balanced. How a very unreasonable, slightly dysfunctional, definitely not very balanced individual (unless you count being equally far on the extreme edges as ‘balanced’), APPLIES themselves to this kind of eating plan, is another story.

It becomes a food-as-therapy thing. “Chop broccoli, drink water,” to paraphrase the eastern sages.

A person living an unhealthy lifestyle is not going to become magically healthy when assigned a good eating plan, not because the plan wouldn’t help, but because without some internal changes, they’re unlikely to be able to follow such a plan. They’ll eventually want to go back to just eating meat, then just eating eggs, then eating 36 straight meals of chili verde, then living off fabulously complicated baked concoctions, then — well you get the idea. The extreme stuff is somehow easier to follow–although, obviously, only in the shorter terms.

The long term, day by day, reasonable, plodding along — that is where the real work of healthy living comes in.

And I assume when you do that, it becomes habit. Regina probably makes broccoli casserole in her sleep, just like Sarah can whip up entire meals in microseconds that would take me a week of planning and days to implement. Some people, whether by nature or by persistent practice, seem to have “eating well” down pat.

***

One specific thing I think I need — call it an “exercise” toward the larger goal — is to work on making vegetables edible. I don’t really know how.

I tried a cauli cheese casserole. It was horrible. I don’t like cauli, and it tastes like cauli. Now this might sound more than stupid, but the shredded cauli stir-fried like chicken fried rice, doesn’t taste anything like cauli, so I was hopeful. So much for that. And so far I only seem to like broccoli with too much soy sauce, so that needs a better way of cooking, I just don’t know it’ll be edible when done. I haven’t dared try asparagus for years but want to. (I’ve composted plenty in my fridge veggie drawer though, in my optimism.)

I think if I could successfully cook a few veggies in a way that I liked them–this is not easy, I’ve never eaten them my whole life because I don’t like them!–that obviously, getting them regularly into my diet will then be easier.

So through the month of April, I hope to come up with several ways to eat decent veggies that are not laborious and that actually taste ok to me and the kid.

April is another attempt at “healthy eating.” I believe I can do better than I did LAST month — and that will be something. If I could do even that for a few months, I would have a vastly healthier habit by the time I got there.

April is for sanity. The rains just arrived here on the flat edge of the ozarks, the sort that turn streets into veritable rivers and cause the grass to suddenly go from two inches of spotty winter nothing to nine inches of overgrowth waiting to dry so you can mow it. I have gardening and landscaping and other things to focus on as well. I have hope that in a month, I can report a definite *improvement* in my “average quantity of sane, well-balanced eating.”

Now…

If sane and reasonable eating actually helps me be saner and more reasonable, that would be a novel side-effect. That might be putting a little too much into it though. Then Regina would not only be my nutritionist, she’d be my shrink.

Hmmmn. It could happen! ;-)

It was 1998, and I had moved to Texas for a contract at Lockheed Martin doing website design. The people I was staying with temporarily had a hobby ranch, and the man of the house, named Guy, a retired Marine, was planning to kill a male pig for an upcoming in-ground barbecue. Guy was a good fellow, working to establish a civilian life, coming home with some PTSD from having been an active participant in ‘not a war’ that was ‘not in Central America’ for some years.

I asked if I could help/witness the pig’s killing and butcher. This completely freaked out everybody who knew me, of course. I was once a vegetarian for nearly five years solely because of my love for animals and my sense of horror about the conditions our food industries imposed upon them. I can’t even go to the animal shelter without nearly having an emotional breakdown about all the little sentient furred souls I can’t rescue and take home. (As an aside, this explains the title of one of my blogs, The 8-Cat Garden…)

But it was a guilt issue. A moral issue, the way I saw it. I felt like it was unfair that I got faceless meat in shrink wrap in the store. I felt like everybody who eats meat, just once, ought to have to witness that something gave its life for them. I knew it would upset me. But I felt like it was a sort of a requirement: if a pig was going to die so we could have a barbecue, what right had I to complain that I “had to watch” — surely, the pig had a more legit complaint about all this than me. I felt like you know, if it traumatizes me, then frankly that’s fair.

A little surprised, he was, but Guy said, ok, sure. It was getting dark, just barely on the twilight side of dusk, as we were late to start.

For a former Marine, he was pretty dense about firepower–possibly he had not actually killed a hog before, as I know he was pretty new to the hobby ranch. He normally hunted deer. To say hogs have thick skulls is an understatement. He should have been using a .44 or so. He used a .22, I think.

We went into the fenced barn area and put all of the animals into the barn… except that pig. My heart wrenched. I can anthropomorphize inanimate objects, so you better believe I can project entire situational awareness and emotion onto any animal larger than a caterpillar. I imagined a sense of confusion and dread settling over the varied inhabitants of the barn.

I imagined a sense of panic on the hog’s part as he realized that he was suddenly alone in the dirt yard, and there stood the human with a rifle. A sense of guilt for what hadn’t even happened yet overwhelmed me. I nearly started crying for the pig. I felt so sorry about the whole situation. I felt like, if I were him, I would be looking to me, the other unarmed human, begging, hoping for some miracle to occur and save me. Like a spider in the bathtub, trying so desperately to save its own life that even I, terrified of them, save them and put them outside, just for the ethics of it all.

I had just been talking to the pig through the fence earlier. Had visited it for a few days in fact. Had another animal tried to attack it, I would have defended it. Yet here I was helping kill it. I wondered if doing so out of deliberation instead of ‘instinct’ like animals made humans sociopathic. Then again, maybe one reason humans are sometimes sociopaths and animals aren’t, is because thanks to the addition of some degree of autonomous awareness, we NEED to be able to shift into that when necessary: like for killing our food, even if we loved it 24 hours before, even if we are personally not hungry right that second, but planning ahead.

But I was not about to make Guy suffer me being a wimp about it. So I stood stoically, a rope in my hand for the later hauling, and waited quietly.

Guy aimed and fired. It was a perfect shot.

Except, of course, that only being a .22 and at a little bit of distance, it did not remotely kill the pig. The pig screamed in pain, a truly bone-chilling sound, and took off running. I stood with my back against the wood of the barn, holding the rope he had given me, my stomach clenched, my jaws clenched, not even breathing in my horror. The pig ran blindly around the barnyard, a frenetic repeat figure-8 of no escape, marking its path in blood.

Finally, Guy was able to get a lock on it and shot it again. It screamed again, and now it was — and fairly, I’d say — mortally pissed off, in addition to being in horrible pain and terror.

This isn’t good. A fairly large pissed off hog is not an animal to mess with. Pigs are only cute and cuddly when they are not large, male, and enraged. The pig loped around the yard and turned, clearly rushing toward me now.

I stood there in shock, thinking as fast as I could, given that I had already completely locked up in trauma. Guy couldn’t shoot it again now; at that point, he might have shot ME, as he was nearly on the other side of the barnyard. I considered trying to run out the little gate, but I didn’t want to let the pig out, because there were farm dogs all over — dogs that travel in packs and most definitely will attack anything covered in blood. The pig. Possibly even me.

Marine training apparently kicked in. Boy did he move fast.

Guy took three steps running sideways across the yard at an angle and literally leapt into the air, flying over the top of the pig as it ran under him toward me, and landed on him like a wild scripted TV wrestling stunt, a big serrated hunting knife in one hand, his other wrapping around the pig’s neck to hold on, which after faltering once under his weight (though he was a fairly thin fellow), instantly started half-dragging him forward.

The pig was now really screaming. Blood was gushing all over the pig, Guy, the ground, and the pig was still running toward me. Guy pulls himself forward and with his right hand literally starts sawing through the jugular of the pig’s neck, trying to stop it before it got to me, trying to kill it the only way left, given the total failure of the gun to do the job. Saw-saw-SCREEEEEEEAM-gush, pig falters, pig resumes dragging, saw-saw-SCREEEEEAM — I think you get the idea.

Guy is kind of yelling something at me that I can’t make out over the pig’s screams, as they get closer to me. (This is all happening at ridiculous speed, although my retelling makes it sound much longer.) The back of my head translated all this to, “He is probably saying something like, ‘Get the hell out of the way!’“, but I’m wondering what I can do to help him — I have a rope in my hands, and I hold it tight in my fists, leaning over a little, ready to try and wrap it around the hog’s neck and twist tight while moving to the side if it reaches me, probably futile and dangerous, but the only thing I could think of.

But just at the last moment, the pig faltered again and finally fell, overcome by Guy’s weight and its own blood loss, gushing from the neck, bleeding at my feet, as a pool of thick red spreads over the dirt where we are all gathered in a tight little frantic knot by the barn door. Guy is still hanging on to him like a linebacker on the ground with a tackle, breathing hard. He looks up at me, covered in blood and dirt, and meets my eyes for a rather long moment.

Forget the pig. Never piss off a Marine.

Through this entire event I’ve made not a single sound. Inside my head though, I had a “thought loop.” That is something I’ve gotten at times in my life when I am so mentally affected by something — extreme mortification or fear — that literally some single, simple thought just plays over and over and over in my mind. I couldn’t stop my head.

I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

Guy got up, and took the rope from me, and wrapped it around the pig, tied some special knot I guess, and starts dragging it. I carried the rifle, and we left the barnyard and went around to the front of the property, an out-building next to the house, and he took the pig and hung it up in this area where he normally skins other things (like deer I think).

Guy went to clean up a little. Silently, with every muscle in my body still tensed, my stomach feeling like iron, I just stood there and looked at it for a long time.

It was chilly outside, not that I felt the temperature. Its head hung down, with a big terrible gash at the neck, and as blood ran out in a small but steady stream onto the dirt, thick steam rose up from the gaping wound where body heat hit the air.

I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

But as I stood there for quite a long time, a curious thing occurred. My perspective started shifting. I felt it happening inside me, like a change in awareness of some kind.

I began to realize that for me, it was not the pig anymore. I no longer felt like, “This is the mangled body of the pig I was talking to yesterday.” Rather, I felt like, “This is a carcass.” I no longer had a sense of spirit, of identity, of sentience.

It just seemed like meat now.

***

The next morning its butchered carcass went into the barbecue pit.

I didn’t really like the taste of it though. I never much liked pork aside from bacon and sausage (though I’ve learned to like loin) and I dislike anything even slightly gamey. If that death experience didn’t get a lot of nasty chemicals running through it, nothing would.

I feel that spiritually, I brought that trauma on myself by basically feeling that I deserved trauma as part of this event. I certainly got a little.

I do wish the whole death had gone better, for goodness sake. For the pig’s sake. And even for Guy’s.

But I don’t feel guilty.

And the odd thing is, I haven’t felt guilty for eating meat since that night.

We are hunters. Animals are prey. If we were not killing them, something in the wild would be. If I had to, I would hunt. And while I would be sorry it was necessary, I would not feel guilty about doing it.

PJ

P.S. I was reminded of this experience thanks to a post and comments over at Tracy’s “Fear and Loathing in the Kitchen” blog. (Which seems almost appropriate for the subject matter of today!)

They say that ex-Catholics and ex-Smokers can be recognized by others from miles away. I wonder if this goes for dieting, too.

One of the more sociologically interesting things about the whole subject of obesity is how people react to not wanting to be fat.

I don’t mean by dieting. (Actually, dieting may be one of the least interesting subjects to me on earth right now. I’m simply not in the zone for it to fascinate me at the moment. I have, temporarily, reduced my eating life to two simple truisms: Eating healthily is good; Eating poorly is bad. This doesn’t actually determine my diet. It simply provides moral commentary on it from the background of my attendant guilt complexes.)

I mean by how they behave. There is more to diet-related behavior than what you put in your mouth, of course. Including a good deal of what spews out from it.

Recently I was reading an article from the Sunday Times by India Knight, called Face it, fatty, your genes are innocent (2008Feb10).

There was something curious about it, which was this: the writer, once you waded through the swamp of scathing insult, and if you happened to know something about her aside from this piece, is actually promoting a low-carb eating approach. This is rare enough to see in mainstream media that it’s usually almost a celebration.

Alas, the article didn’t actually say anything useful enough to do readers any good, but, I don’t think that was the point of the article anyway.

***

I feel that what the article reveals is something that has nothing to do with food, but with prejudice, and the way that socially people adapt to living within a culture permeated by that prejudice.

Obesity-ism has gotten so pervasive and so brutal that fat people have begun developing a world-sized case of Stockholm Syndrome. They now identify more with the people terrorizing them than with their own feelings or those of others in the same role, past or present.

In part to psychologically distance themselves from the horrible role of victim, they become the aggressor, victimizing others with the same demeaning and snide, patronizing and invalidating forms of insult that bullies have used since time began, no matter what the “-ism” being practiced.

Knight wrote:

Fat gene, my foot. Funny how it seems to manifest itself only in the prosperous, cake-guzzling carb-and-sugar-laden West. Where are the obese Sudanese toddlers? The porky Ethiopians?

The Gary Taubes book “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” debunked the idea that obese people are only found in ‘rich’ countries. Foods that create obesity are available even to–and often moreso for–the poor. I did appreciate that she recognized carbs as a culprit, obviously, but this didn’t seem to take the argument anywhere different than the typically misinformed dietary commentary, which is a bit odd.

She continues:

The excuses that people make for their own fatness drive me mad (I know whereof I speak and am not wholly unsympathetic: I was very fat myself at one point), and you can just see the mileage they’re going to get out of being told that it’s all down to genes. It’s not. It’s down to taking control of your life and down to choice: you can choose to be fat or choose to be normal. You can choose to make sacrifices or choose to be lazy — and if you choose to be lazy and remain fat, then fair enough, but accept that it’s your own doing and take responsibility for it.

All the mileage they’re going to get out of it. I see.

I agree with her on the part about responsibility. In fact, I don’t know anybody — including just about every morbidly obese person I know thanks to my involvement in the lowcarb world — who would disagree with the above perspective about responsibility.

But then when I step back and think about it, I realize: exactly who, in today’s world, is NOT considered responsible for their obesity?

Despite that thyroid can add weight, despite that other hormones can add to weight, despite that physical ailments and medications can contribute to either gaining weight or not being able to lose it, do you ever — have you EVER — seen one of the near-infinite number of fattists, in the midst of their sneers and remarks and jokes about fat people, build-in the caveat that perhaps they should be compassionate as it might not be the fat person’s fault? No? Because I never have. Ever. Even in the rare cases where a person IS fat and it is genuinely something they did not “do” (even via ignorance or accident), I have never seen anybody of the nature to snark about “fat people” or “why people are fat”, make the slightest allowance for that.

So let’s turn that perspective a bit: have you ever known a seriously fat person, no matter what their eating habits, who felt zero sense of guilt or shame or blame for their weight? Who honestly believed that no matter what, they were somehow “totally not responsible” for their weight? I know plenty who will say that little they do NOW affects their weight or metabolism, but I never met a fat person who considered themselves completely unresponsible for their weight in the first place.

Sure, I’ve met fat people who will attribute less cause to their eating than they should, and I’ve met fat people who have seriously said (and I happen to believe them) that they eat what person X they live with eats, who is 1/3 their size. But I’ve never met someone who simply projected the entire situation onto some force outside them, like it had nothing to do with them at all. I think I would probably consider that a form of pathology.

Put it this way: I’ve never met someone who so whined about it being totally not their fault, that they would NEED someone in an article telling them that genetics don’t matter, they just need to quit eating pie.

Someone needed to be told that?

On the contrary, what I have mostly seen is a big world filled with people who feel if anything such a ridiculous level of guilt, shame, and humiliation about being fat, that en masse in the USA alone they are willing to spend upwards of 30 BILLION dollars annually to try and deal with it. They are willing to buy and try infinite magazine advice and TV infomercials and books and more, to help them deal with it; they are dedicated to buying frozen meals and attending meetings and counting calories and weighing protein etc. all of this to “deal with it.” To deal, in great part, with their sense of overwrought responsibility, with their sense of utter mortification for wearing the modern sin-mark of Cain on the outside: FAT.

They don’t feel empowered. They just feel to blame.

So who exactly is this writer trying to save from themselves with the so-witty sarcasms of, “Fat genes, you see. More pie? Frappuccino with sweet whipped cream to wash it down?”

Maybe in her reality, fat people just love being fat, deliberately go out and do something to stay that way every single day, and feel zero sense of responsibility, let alone any nearly crushing, mind-bending shame that results in not wanting to leave the house, feeling like a personal failure, or whatever (I hear many variations on this theme from others over time). All those self-responsible, socially humiliated, media-mortified fatties are living in MY world apparently.

She added:

It’s no good wailing about rising levels of obesity if you show no interest whatsoever in trying to understand why people overeat in the first place. People overeat for psychological reasons, not physical ones.

Hmmm. Well, I do know many people who say they eat for psychological reasons. I personally think we attribute far too much to psychology, and I’d like to see obesity research and approach as a whole get back to biology where it ought to be rooted, and out of the armchair of psychotherapy. But I do agree that getting your head right is the first step (for certain), and that a lot of “eating disorders” have firm correlation with psychology. I simply suspect that nearly every serious eating disorder, however, is at least equally if not moreso rooted in physiology. As long as we simply “blame” people for either over-eating or eating poorly, rather than look at what physiology may be driving that, we’re unlikely to learn much.

Blaming psychology for fat is an existing precedent, and one of the reasons why obesity is equated with some failing of character or morality. Because it is not seen as a disease — as “a disorder of excess fat accumulation” as Taubes put it — but rather, is seen as a psychological state, it can be grafted onto all the assumptions about what’s in your head: gluttony and sloth, greed and laziness, emotional weakness, etc.

So while I agree totally with the “personal responsibility” angle, still what I see is just another harmony to that same getting-very-old insulting refrain applied with a broad stroke to all fat people:

Above all, we need to get to grips with the fact that fatness is a personal choice, one that can’t be blamed on anybody – or anything – other than our own greedy behaviour.

For whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be any ordinary humans involved here, only the far-extreme of greedy gluttons who won’t be responsible at all.

It appears since India lost weight, she is now entitled to be just as stereotyping and insulting of fat people now as I’m sure others were when she herself was overweight.

In some people, weight loss brings greater wisdom. In others, it just brings the opportunity to leap over to the other side of the fence, and in the determination to not be a victim anymore, to become one of the victimizers.

It is a bummer when I actually AGREE with 90% of what someone says, and yet despite this, still manage to feel like they provided little in an article which could be construed as helpful in any way, and plenty which is pretty plainly hurtful.

***

It’s a fine line. I’ve seen people who lost weight on low carb have a hard time finding that line: the good intent that wants to demand people take responsibility, step up to the plate (no pun intended), and go to bat for themselves, believe that they have the power to shape their lives and their bodies, and refuse to let anything get in their way, is a GOOD thing.

But there’s that fine line to walk, where just on the other side of it, one is ignoring every possible mitigating circumstance, ignoring every detail that makes a unique human situation, and that leaves a person “where they are now” no matter what/how it came to be. That a person IS fat, does not mean they are doing something to be that way right now; it does not mean they don’t consider themselves responsible. They may eat better than 90% of the population and work hard at it every day and still be fat.

The whole approach is basically the attitude, “If you want to be fat fine, but don’t blame anybody but yourself,” but who actually does blame anybody else? Nobody I know. You start wherever you are, and you move forward by believing you can and you’re worth it. It is the pompous editorialists who assign blame for obesity: most fat people don’t assign it anywhere outside themselves.

The very psychology that makes people feel empowered enough to make a change, that makes people feel strong and optimistic enough to believe they can do it, that this can work for them, is the same psychology that is simply mortified by snappy jibes about their gluttony, by assumptions about their assumed major eating disorders, and by snarky public insults that equate the size of their thighs to the degree of their moral inferiority.

We are taught all our lives to hate fat, and by extension, to resent and belittle fat people. It is not so different than women who clearly hold a sexist bias against women in general, despite being one, because that is the cultural mindset they have grown up in. It is more than possible to grow up inside a culture with pervasive prejudice and, despite being part of that group suffering the bias, to learn to hold that bias yourself.

Even in decent people, even in well intentioned people, the bias still stands out at times, highlighted by the tendency to put emphasis not on proactive shared-empowerment, but rather, on negative demean-the-assumed-weakness.

***

I call it the ex-dieter complex. Now that they lost some weight, and it doesn’t matter how, they feel completely at ease not only sharing the same insulting prejudices that the culture at large already suffers, but doubly righteous in doing so, since “they used to be fat.”

Fat is one of the few situations of prejudice that would breed this, of course. People cannot behave that way because “they used to be black.” Only in the case of obesity can the victim become a stereotyping, insulting bully and actually walk away from it feeling as if they’ve done those they just insulted some kind of favor.

Some days when I am crankier than usual, there is something that really bugs me about, in general, “the low carb world” that I see online. (Meaning, the overall ’social result’ of community.) Do you ever notice this?

It’s this: so many people just want to eat crap.

If you tell them they can’t have crappy carbs, they instantly start doing everything they can to reproduce the crap in a lowcarb fashion.

Surely this must be what inspired all those horrible frankenfood pseudo-lowcarb abominations that bombed in the grocery world (and gave the erroneous impression to marketers that “low-carb is dead” as a result).

I found that when I quit eating things breaded, for example, I quit needing to find semi-lowcarb grain-based specialty-foods for breading stuff. This matters because, even though you can do it, most the time it means you use the majority of your daily carb on lowcarb bread crumbs or carbquik instead of on something actually good for you like veggies. (Or at least almonds or seeds or cheese or something.)

If it were just a little in a muffin batch or meatloaf it’d be one thing, but foods with major elements that are based on crappy food have more than one problem.

I’ve nothing against creative food. It’s one of my personal focii in fact. And I’ve nothing against reproducing highcarb food in lowcarb ways really, that’s natural. Except that some things, you really cannot produce in a lowcarb way without either getting into highly processed stuff or …

Or without keeping your taste for it. If despite being lowcarb, I continued to eat tacos instead of taco salad, burgers instead of pattymelts, and breaded chicken instead of baked, roasted, crocked, parm’d, grilled chicken, then I would still WANT those things.

A great deal of going-off-lowcarb seems to hinge on the person feeling like there is something that is high-carb that they just aren’t getting. Over time, I’ve come to feel that in fact, the problem is not that there is something they aren’t getting. The problem is that they have not adapted to “wanting what they have.”

Think of it like an appetite for sex — food being related. ;-) A man might not have the buxom blonde coworker he thinks is sexy, but that is only an issue if he really wants her. If he is happy with his woman, he won’t CARE that he doesn’t/can’t have the other one; it may be eye-candy just like some high-carb foods are, sure, but it’s just no big deal and there is no real desire that would make him give up what he has.

Well I think it’s kinda similar with food. If a person keeps eating “crap-LIKE” foods, they continue their appetite for crap food. Then when someone goes, “Hey, here’s some crap food!” they eventually think, “Wow, that looks great, and it’s even more familiar-tasting than the crap-LIKE food I’ve been faking on lowcarb!”

But if you adapt people to eating real food in a way that is healthy, and they learn to like real food made healthily, then they have far less reason to “go off” lowcarb. They don’t feel like they’re “missing or faking” a burger bun with lettuce. They don’t feel like they’re missing a tortilla when they eat the ingredients as a hot plate. They don’t feel like they’re missing breading when they eating roasted chicken.

And eventually, they will breed an appetite, and a FAMILIARITY, with good food, and reduce both appetite and familiarity with the crap. Familiarity is one of the big issues too.

So, some days it just irks me to see so many trying to stuff highcarb into lowcarb. Crap is crap. I don’t care if Wheat Protein Isolate and Sweetzfree and ThickNThin made it possible to just barely squeeze that food through the digestive system as “a mostly low-carb ECC” value. That only means that
(a) all those carbs someone could have eaten in life-giving food, they didn’t, and
(b) they continue their familiarity with that food, and
(c) they continue their appetite for food that tastes like that, and
(d) they continue their dependence on specialty foods the local grocery likely doesn’t have or that cost more.

I’m not saying we can’t use high-carb or specialty-stuff. I do. I’m just saying that sometimes I see people who so overwhelm their food with it, either so often, or so overwhelmingly in a given dish, that the reality is, they are NOT “adapting to eating lowcarb as a lifestyle,” they are instead, “attempting to temporarily adapt lowcarb eating to be just like the crappy highcarb eating they always did, except the carbs, and a sense of ‘fake/not as good’.”

Until people learn to LIKE lowcarb well enough that they have NO REASON to be “so tempted by that buxom blonde breaded-fried chicken that they “fall off the wagon” and have some, lowcarb is going to BE a wagon that they can fall off.

Because that is really the point: men don’t sleep with the secretary because they want her, they sleep with her because they have lost interest or concern for their wife. So the reality is that the reason for the wandering-into-badlands is about his relationship with his wife and how he feels about that. If you see what I mean. Well if your relationship with your lowcarb food is great, you have no reason to feel you “need” high-carb food. Because it isn’t about what you don’t have, it’s about how well you like and are comfortable with what you DO have.

When you can eat a piece of roasted chicken, a plain hamburger patty, some stir fried broccoli, and be genuinely happy for it — love it, have it be your most familiar food, have it be something your body learns to have an appetite for — lowcarb is no longer HARD. It’s easy and constant and familiar.

Anything that’s hard, is usually temporary. So it matters.

That is my soapbox for the night!

PJ

In mid-2005 I had a long talk with my Ex. It had been 5 years since I’d made him move out, which means all the way back to Canada, for a long list of unusually good reasons. We hadn’t been more than roommates since Jan 1997 anyway. He wanted to come back (as a roommate-only) and this time ‘for real’ apply for citizenship (finally). No matter that I had no desire to put up with him again, I knew that my kid having her dad locally vs. in another country had to be the priority.

Suddenly inspired, as he likes to cook and garden, I told him that one of the requirements of our agreement, would be that he would cook. Lowcarb, so that I could be healthier without taking all the time myself since I worked, and semi-lowcarb (at the least, “real food”) for the kid, who was beginning to get just a little chubby. Given my weight, of course, I was worried for her, and wanted to stop that in its tracks. She was about 4′9-4′10 then, and about 110 lbs.

Like most things that you know are bad ideas, those wrong things that you are doing for the right reasons, it didn’t work out anything like I planned.

He still “couldn’t get around to” applying for citizenship, turned my entire house into such an ebay warehouse there was no room for a kitchen table or even more than a sideways-path through the living room, all while not providing a dime of his income for rent, food, bills, the kid, etc. After previously having ruined me with an IRS situation I will probably never afford to resolve as long as I live, he promptly settled into the same routine again. But…

Worse, in the end, was the food issue. He had no actual interest in making LC food, so most the time I didn’t eat. When he would make something, it was only if it was easy enough to involve LC bread, but since I’m gluten intolerant, then I’d have asthma/allergies, worse apnea problems, lower oxygen level, etc. (Not that he cared, of course!) When I got inspired to do it myself in frustration, he’d promptly make garlic bread or something he knew was my biggest weakness, or the kitchen (now ‘his’) would be so gross I’d just walk away again with no appetite. So I gradually gained weight, from 414 to 467 over 12 months, which I had to lose (fortunately I lost all that and more from Sep-Dec 06).

When it came to the kid, he had even less concern than I had previously, I guess. She ate dominantly fast food and mac&cheese and spaghetti and so on. After 18 months, the kid had gained well over 50 lbs (weighing 165 at 4′11), serious cellulite, the inability to get into anything sold in walmart that is wearable without fashion suicide, could barely get in the biggest karate gi, and now had a nightmare of taunting and humiliation at school. Since the other problems with him were just as present as ever, that was it, and I gave up and made him leave before he ruined my life twice.

That left the kid’s eating habits back in my court.

***

So then I wanted to put her on lowcarb, but nearly everybody made it clear to me that my eating plan was ‘extreme’ and that this would be totally inappropriate for a child. Sure, I could avoid McDonald’s, but “whole grains!” were “necessary”, and apples and bananas and plums and corn and so on, “How could fruit and veggies be unhealthy?”

The leading critic was my stepmother, who thinks the ADA advice is the law. (Her family, under this advice, has died off eyes by feet by heart attacks by cancer for the last 20 years, but this has not changed her views.) We had actual arguments about pasta.

The consensus seemed to be that my denying my kid mac&cheese was some kind of child abuse, because “all things in moderation” was the answer to life, and “pasta is not harmful, and kids love it!”. The fact that I didn’t want her eating potatoes was treated with an attitude as if I’d said that I was sacrificing her to an alien god. I mean it was crazy how simply avoiding high-carbs, not eating a potato, was seen as such a major thing.

Then age 10, she was a carb addict already, begging constantly for bread-pasta-sugar products, to the degree that she didn’t WANT to eat anything else, and would NOT eat anything else if anything with carbs/sugar was an option. It was hard even for me to stay on lowcarb when my house was filled with carby crap I love too of course, and she was constantly begging for fast food or sweets etc.

So about 8 months later, which is around October of ‘07, she was 5′0 and 160. She’d grown at least an inch in the previous 8 months and yet was around the same on the scale, so at least she wasn’t gaining MORE weight. But she had reached the point where her karate gi just wouldn’t work, and left the one exercise I was overpaying for her to have, and she had almost no clothes for school since finding stuff to fit her was so difficult in our small town.

She would sometimes spend a couple hours at night just pouring out her grief and misery about being fat, and not being able to wear cute clothes, and how people at school treated her, and more. I wasn’t fat in school (though I felt I was), so I didn’t have the peer results of that, but her obvious suffering just made me grieve inside for my baby that obviously I was not “protecting” the way I felt a mom should.

Around November 2006, I finally snapped. That was when she could no longer go to karate for lack of fitting a gi. I felt like somehow that was the last straw, “Her certain doom”.

And I put her on MY lowcarb plan. I decided everybody else could stuff their opinions. She was 11, 5′0, and weighed 164, that was about 6 weeks ago.

I did make a couple exceptions for her: once or twice a week I give her a little corn & peas nuked with some butter as a treat (those are more carby than I can eat, but I let her). I let her have as much fibrous veggies (the ones I make for both of us, broccoli, asparagus, cauli, peppers, onion, and more for her than me, baby carrots) and berries as she wants. I don’t worry about counting her carbs or calories — I simply make a point that nothing she eats is anything but lowcarb.

This meant that I started cooking a LOT more — 2-4x a day — so that she would always have “real food” and not be eating stuff from a can or frozen box or fast food, because mom was busy. This was a really big shift in my own time allotment to be honest, and if I hadn’t been on lowcarb, I wouldn’t have been healthy enough to have the energy/strength to do it. It has meant a substantial shift in my “available time” in a day. But since I started having her help me, it also meant that she and I spent a little more time together.

She used to tell me that she was constantly hungry. That even after she ate she was hungry. That she seemed to have “no off button” and that she would eat until she was sick if she had her way. She certainly did want to nosh 24/7 it seemed. So the rule I had was that I didn’t want her to be hungry on lowcarb, EVER, and I would try to make sure there was always something she could eat.

To my surprise, she started quickly asking for more meat. I mean, the girl ate meat like it was going out of style, and hasn’t stopped. I thought she would beg for more of whatever had the most carbs, but no. She became a protein fiend. I was a little nervous about this for awhile. I wondered if maybe she was overeating and I should put limits on it. But as I had recently read the Gary Taubes book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and noted all the research with animals (and some humans), I decided if she was craving protein, it was probably that her body actually NEEDED protein.

In the end, I adopted this strategy: I make her wait 30 minutes after our meal. If she still wants more food, I will make her more. That’s just to make sure she isn’t inhaling dinner and it hasn’t yet hit the tummy. She still continues to eat a lot of protein. Not too much for her size, just vastly more than she ever had. She used to only want carbs. The shift has been astounding.

And in just over a month, she went from not fitting in a size 17 jeans, to fitting easily in size 15, and I don’t think it’ll be that long before she’s in a 14.

She has noticed repeatedly and with great delight how much her stomach is smaller, her upper arms are thinner, the extra fat around her neck/chin has disappeared, her thighs, butt and calves are smaller — even her feet are smaller and no longer “puff out on top” in slipper-style flats.

For the first time in a long time, she now has at least enough clothing to not feel mortified at school. She now can put on clothes and look in the mirror and not cry. She actually “feels cool” and proud of how she looks.

Here’s the interesting thing: She weighed 162 the other day — only 2 lbs less than when we began. And yet, she’s lost 2-3 pants sizes, and obvious fat everywhere!

Now my sneaking suspicion is that her body was chronically protein deprived, and used all this meat she’s been eating like crazy to build up her lean body mass again, so all the fat she has lost, balanced against muscle rebuilt, comes out to about equal.

Her energy level is much higher. Her attitude and affection are 200% better. Thank god — the whiny lazy angry girl seems to have greatly changed. Getting her to do chores is vastly easier. Those are side-effects I didn’t expect! They rock!

And here’s the real kicker: she no longer begs for carbs and sugar. She no longer pleads for Taco Bell because she’s so hungry and it’s fast and cooking would take awhile. She is so EXCITED by the idea that eating this way has helped her lose bodyfat, that with rare exceptions, she doesn’t WANT to eat carbs. There have been times when I was willing to slide on something, and she said, “No!”

She has become a huge supporter in my lowcarb journey — instead of a problem. She is the one now that encourages me to go to the walking park with her. And given the amount of meat she eats, and how much she loves veggies, it’s been super helpful in improving even the way I do lowcarb eating, re-focusing me on those elements.

She’s so beautiful. And now, she is so much happier. As well as healthier. And she looks better, honestly, though there is still more extra fat to lose, I trust now that it will come off. She is going back to karate and will be more easily able to do it as well, I am sure. Her legs look longer, and she is just so much happier across the board, that it is clear that her misery at school and with herself because of her weight was affecting her a good deal.

I just wanted to report that. I know that I’ve had a lot of insecurity as a mother about “what is proper to feed the kid”. Isn’t it weird that most of our culture will not blink about living at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and people will argue a kid’s “need” to have pasta, yet if you tell them you’re making the kid eat mostly meat, dairy, fibrous veggies and berries, they act like it’s some bizarre diet-cult that you’re inflicting on them?!

***

As for me, I am down to 370 now. No big deal really, since health is now my priority before fat loss — low carb is about health-sanity for me, not a diet — but everything helps as far as my energy level and comfort goes. Since I began at over 500# (and a size 8x on the bottom–tip: they don’t make clothes for that size…), that’s fairly significant.

My 6x pants, one brand is falling off me, the other brand fits ok but loosely. Today I splurged and ordered 6x and 5x ‘cargo pants’ from Junonia — which will be the first ‘real’ pants (not stretchy soft things) that I’ve worn since… since… 1991 or so. (And of course, I could wear nothing but homemade skirts for years and years.) I can wear the 5x shirts my parents have bought me for the last few years at Christmas, so that was nice, that I instantly have several new things to wear.

I can do walking I couldn’t before, I can fit in seats at the city theatre now, where musicals and ballet and stuff happen (finally, I can take my kid to those!), and on the whole I just feel a lot better.

I have shifted every meal to either protein powder + cream + flax seeds (for me only, and sometimes frozen berries in there), or to MEAT primarily, usually with veggies. We eat a whole lot of simple hamburger patties, pork cutlets, or chicken breasts, with and without sauces or cheeses or dressings, and usually with stir-fried veggies.

We were still able to make super yummy holiday treats (peanut butter cookies, almond joys), and now and then when we want something sweet, I’ll make some kind of bowl muffin (egg, cream cheese, flax seed, flavor extracts, sweetzfree, and sometimes cocoa)… or LC cheesecake. Not often, but on occasion when she is feeling like she wants something sweet.

She’s happy, I’m happy, we’re both losing fat and gaining energy, and life is going well. 2008 will be great! I feel sure of it. :-)

Not long ago I was rereading the fabulous chef Karen Barnaby’s book The Low-Carb Gourmet. It costs more than more recipe books, and it was written a few years ago so I think it probably has more soy in it than a modern book (which might be more likely to employ more almond meal, coconut meal, flaxseed meal, etc. for example). But it is really a very good cookbook. It’s not just a bunch of versions of quickies that most of us know from hanging out in lowcarb forums, but some really elegant meals and photos to make anybody drool. Some terrific LC foods I think Karen invented include the ‘cauli-rice’ that is surely one of the coolest dishes ever, especially since it can be anything from dill to chicken stir-fried.

On 12/3 I began another 12 week cycle of lowcarb intent. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve been properly LC, although I did some for a week or so before the 12/3 date to first drop the water weight. I’m keeping a food log which, in general, is fairly predictable. So are my taste buds.

So today I was thinking about my recent eating. I went and got a 5 lb. thing of hamburger, I divided it into 12, 7oz chunks, wrapped in foil and dropped all the foil things into a ziploc with ‘7oz 85/15 ground beef’ on the front. Every night I take out a couple and toss them into the fridge. 2 days later they are ready to eat. I just flatten it, add sea salt and cracked black pepper to both sides, spray a pan and fry it. When done, I put a couple tablespoons of homemade blue cheese dressing on top of it. Yummmmn.

My 11 year old and I have eaten more ‘hamburger patties’ — her with some ranch, me with some blue cheese — than any other food for the last two weeks. Peasant food, I suppose, proletarian fare compared to the glamorous glory of Karen’s stuff! But I really am acquiring a taste for the things at this point. Probably in great part because it’s just EASY.

So far, stuff I can smear on an ordinary burger patty:
blue cheese dressing
ranch dressing
any kind of cheese
lowcarb ketchup
pesto (yum)
sauteed mushrooms-onions

Anybody have any other ideas? Since this seems to be becoming one of the staples of my diet, I figure variety is a good thing. A sauce/topping needs to be thick enough and/or strong tasting enough to really mean something in this case. (I don’t put gunk on steaks. Only on meatloaf and burgers. ;-))

Reading Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories, Bad Calories” has been a minor epiphany in several different areas. It’s a ‘research review’, which is not ‘general’ reading, you’d have to be a serious reader and seriously into the subject to enjoy it — but I am.

I feel like someone who has been wandering through the desert for a lifetime, constantly tempted by rapidly vanishing mirages of weight loss promises, distracting myself from the hopelessness by focusing on my feet, and finally I tripped over something real. Something that revolutionizes the way I think about quite a few things, something that makes me look up from the book and holler, “Of COURSE! Yes, that makes sense!”

I’ve always felt fat was probably a ’symptom’ of something (and no, not “eating 12 pounds of bonbons a day” as most seem to assume). Since obesity is associated with all the “diseases of Western Civilization,” it makes sense that obesity is a symptom (an illness of a sort) just like all those diseases — diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzheimers, etc. — and that they probably all have the same core causes. It turns out there is over a century of research demonstrating exactly that.

The amazing part isn’t that fat is a hormonal, endocrinal, metabolic problem on display. Most of us knew that. The amazing part is how much evidence for this, and against the “healthy high-carb low-fat” hypothesis there really is, that has managed to be marginalized in one way or another.

At this point the agriculture chemical industry (huge), the modern food manufacturing industries (huge), the modern food retail and grocery industries (huge), the the modern pharmaceutical industries for heart issues (huge), diabetic issues (huge), cancer issues (huge), and even pharmaceutical industries for psychological issues research suggests are probably also ‘diseases of western civilization’ from the same root (depression, schizophrenia, etc.) all have a “vested interest” in keeping the global brainwashing going strong against meat and in favor of carbohydrates.

I think it’s making me paranoid on low-carb’s behalf: I’m beginning to see new “press releases” on research as literal propaganda. The rift of disconnect between what these studies actually say, and what they are proposed to have said, is getting wider and more astonishing by the day. Quite literally it is getting to the point where I see media examples regularly where a study that specifically did NOT find in favor of carbs, is promoted widely as having done exactly that. “The Big Lie,” this is called in politics: say something often enough and loudly enough, and people will accept it. It will seem impossible that anything so “pervasive” could be wrong.

On an only slightly separate topic, Regina Wilshire’s blog article “Don’t Buy Their Snake Oil” is a good look at a research presentation that nicely examples something not uncommon nowdays: something presented so badly that the word “wrong” doesn’t even sufficiently address the issue.

Moving on.

So basically, when you stick food in your body, lots of stuff happens, but concerning fat, it simplifies to one of two things happening:

1 – It is used for energy, or
2 – It is stored as fat.

Pretty simple. So when you see someone fat and sedentary, the obvious (and research supported) conclusion is: that person is not getting the energy from their food. Their body is essentially hoarding it in fat cells, refusing to give it to them.

So, the person will be driven to eat, as they have less energy. They will be more sedentary, because they have less energy. They are likely to eat carbs, because that is ‘energy’, which will only make things worse, as their insulin-resistance increases. Eating carbs even causes depletion and/or greater need for a variety of vitamins (some Bs, C and E so far, maybe more) which can cause body problems.

All of this not because the person is some kind of societal moral failure, but because their body is processing and reacting to insulin differently than it used to. Some people it starts in early childhood, some not till they are 60, some for genetic reasons, some for ‘everything you ingested that came before’ reasons, etc.

The bottom line, as Taubes explains, is that most people do not get fat because they keep eating; they keep eating because they are getting fat — because the food they’re taking in is, quite literally, not feeding them the energy they need.

***

After reading about carbs through the entire book, I had a realization at the end. And that is:

Food = meat.

Meat including fish, poultry, etc. of course.

Pretty much throughout history, that’s what men ate. Until 10+ thousand years ago when agriculture graced our world.

I thought about this a lot, and came to the conclusion that culturally, I’ve been brainwashed into expecting several different foods at a time (especially at dinner), and starches constantly.

But in reality, FOOD, is a piece of steak or burger or chicken or pork or fish. Everything else (except fats) is just the details, just the seasonal add-ons.

***

This helped me in a surprising way. I’ve long had a problem with protein powder, which due to my size and difficulty with eating meat 5x a day, I need to use. But I have the ability to taste the stuff (any brand–I’ve tried many, good ones) no matter how “buried” it is in other stuff. It is vile, vile, vile, that is all there is to it. Even ice cream and chocolate syrup, when I once went off lowcarb, could not mask the vile taste of protein powder. So since last September when I went lowcarb I have wanted to drink this but I balk. “I don’t LIKE it. I don’t WANT to eat food I don’t like.”

Ta-da! Presto, I changed my way of thinking, and protein powder fell out of the food category. Now it qualifies more like maybe a medicine for fat and weakness. Those are supposed to taste bad–big deal. So now I’ve been having generally two protein drinks a day, adding 76g of protein to my day that is making all the difference in how I feel.

And now when I think about food, I think about — food. I have burgers, steak, chicken, pork chops, gourmet sausages, I’m planning meatballs. I make eggs, with shredded hard cheese, or sometimes an egg-cream cheese bowl muffin, but generally, I’m eating MEAT. I’m not “Paleo,” I’m not avoiding dairy or veggies or anything like that. I’m simply considering food to be MEAT, and if I can’t have that, having some protein powder.

For the first time since September 06 when I began low carb, I have actually made all my nutrient counts, ideally no less, for some time now. I’ve been eating so that I am totally satiated every day, and so I have enough protein to feel strong, and I’m eating truly yummy foods (even a little something fairly sweet), and yet when I really push my food intake to the max, I make nearly 1500 calories, 120++g protein, 60++g fats, and generally less than 20 carbs. And I’m willing to eat 40-50 carbs a day, it’s just amazingly easy, when I eat “real food”, to keep them low.

My carb intake will be increasing next week with my zucchini and cauliflower experiments in the kitchen, and several new muffin and cookie experiments (using almond and coconut flours, as I now make just about everything gluten-free as well as lowcarb). Still it will remain low and my protein and fats will remain high.

And it’s easy. I don’t know why it wasn’t easy before. I have an old blog post, “Don’t Have a Cow, Man” about my issues with getting enough protein. And yet somehow now I’m looking at 160g a day when before I couldn’t seem to make 80g very often. Since I can really track my sense of well-being and leg-strength to the protein quantity I’ve ingested in the 1-3 days prior, that’s really important.

And I find that if I have something sweet to eat, I can eat literally 3-4 bites of it and feel like, “Ok, that’s enough.” I’m not hungry; but I’m not stuffed, either. This is the first time in my life I recall simply feeling “satiated”. I’m good at ignoring hunger, and I’m good at feeding hunger, and I’m good at feeling stuffed, but those were the only three options for me until now. Now suddenly it’s like my body is just where it needs to be.

Being back on lowcarb again (before long I’ll update my on/off LC graph, which as always shows the story so much more eloquently than any words), I’m already reaping the rewards. I can sleep, deeply and fully. I can wake up without feeling I’m under the sea. I can think and function when I wake up. I have energy and feel like getting up. With one exception I have gotten up earlier than usual and done far more for my day by 9am than I used to get done by noon.

And the main thing is, I can get up and cook/eat 5x a day because I want to do well at this — but mostly, because I have the energy.

The more meat I eat, the more like a stealthy hunter I feel. :-)

The older I get, the more I understand that nearly everything I learned without trying in my life ranged from irrelevant, to inaccurate, to utter bilge from which I would someday have to de-indoctrinate myself.

Or as musician Paul Simon once put it in his song ‘Kodachrome’,

When I think back on all the crap
I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all

The same sure seems to go for nutrition, exercise and metabolism. Everything I ever learned by accident, by default, or from official sources, is so bogus. Not until I actually began pursuing information on my own did I start running into stuff that even made sense when questioned a little. Let alone that explained a lot of the questions.

My stepmother once told my kid the memorable line:

Eat your french fries. They’re a vegetable.

I couldn’t make up something like that. It takes all kinds…

Recently a guy named Gary Taubes published a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories : Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease. He’s a journalist for SCIENCE magazine who spent six years reviewing the research in these areas, and finally put it all together in a way that other people with brains can understand. The realizations and conclusions he came to, based on the actual research (not just what was popular or assumed) pretty much suggest what I should have known all along:

Since the government and school were telling me to avoid red meat and fat and eggs and to eat a diet dominated by grains and carbs, I probably should have figured that once I applied my brain to discovering the real facts, they’d be the polar opposite of the Official Party Line.

Taubes was allegedly interviewed on CNN recently. Instead of interviewing an author about the book, they brought in several other people they felt would disagree with him to make it a lynching instead. The host and one or more of the guests so consistently interrupted the author that I had to stop reading halfway through, because his inability to get a single complete sentence out — NOT EVEN ONE — finally drove me nuts. Link to the interview transcript is here. (And not surprisingly, the Fat Is Evil cult of culture and its bazillion adherents want to dog him. So if you read his book, please, write a review, and post it at amazon.com and any other bookseller you know of.)

So if you buy one book this year, let it be this guy’s book. It is allegedly one of the most concise-yet-depth reviews of the real research, and the real story, on a lot of topics that have huge relevance and impact on our lives. It’s bucking the trend of nearly everything. It’s contradicting the authority of nearly every official politically correct source — with, ironically, the authority of scientifically valid, hands-on research, and many decades of it, as a big heavy bat.

And it means the author has to suffer through innumerable talk shows where bozos won’t let him get a word in edgewise because they KNOW EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE THERE IS TO KNOW ALREADY, which is why, of course, the diet industry spouting exactly what the bozos do makes dozens of billions a dollars a year in a country where half the population is still too fat.

The wisdom that Atkins had to share survived in great part solely because of the popularity of his book. He had every source against him, there was insane amounts of literal disinformation and outright falsehoods widely broadcast in media, but the one thing that kept his books on the shelf, kept his ideas in the circuit of the population, was that his book sold a LOT of copies. In other words, the government can say what it wants, but in the end, people vote with their pocketbooks when it comes to what they’re interested in.

Vote for this guy. I’m delighted to see a serious, intelligent, concise yet with details, overview of a ton of research, put together in one package. I’m delighted to see real science get real attention. And I hope he does really well with his effort. He genuinely deserves enough sales to support the cause of truth.

This post is going to be really politically incorrect in the obesity world, I can see that coming already. This is just an honest thought; I may be wrong. It’s just an idea, the associations of which seem so strong to me I have to mention them.

***

A long time ago, I spent several years obsessively studying hypnosis, as well as some related fields (Neuro-Linguistic Programming or ‘NLP’, graphoanalysis & graphotherapeutics or ‘handwriting analysis’, cult psychology, etc.).

One of the most fascinating, I mean mind-bending, ass-kicking, that-is-freakin AMAZING things of all that study was the subject of “post-hypnotic commands.”

Let me give you an example. Say that under hypnosis you tell a subject that when the clock strikes 8:12pm, they are going to suddenly stand up from their chair, hop on their left foot three times, take off their right shoe, pound it on a table a couple times, run out the door and yell into the hall “Hey everyone! I’m a chicken!” and then come back and put their shoe on, and sit down like nothing happened. I’m making this up but it’s a fair example, though complex. You also tell them they aren’t going to remember being told to do this.

If the hypnosis goes well, all of this happens exactly as planned.

Now here’s the part that still fries my brain to this day:

Ask the subject why they did that. And they will intellectually rationalize up a reason on the spot. You see, they had a rock in their shoe, and they were just kidding around to wake up this boring quiet office space, and…

Consciously, they would ARGUE to SUPPORT their rationalized-invented reasons because they totally believe them. Anything they can project or associate as a ‘reason’ for their behavior, they likely will, and they BELIEVE it. As far as they were concerned, it was a decision, and they made it.

This still blows my mind.

(I should add I’m in the top 1-2% of hypnotically suggestible subjects myself. Anybody unfamiliar with this who thinks that only weak or stupid people are suggestible is ignoring billions in annual marketing money that proves otherwise.)

Here is the question that has got to come to mind:

“How much of our lives are motivated by subconscious impulses that we simply do without thought, and if we need to come up with a reason, we consciously rationalize something to explain it?”

?

There is something that has been bugging me about stuff I’ve been reading in the weight-loss world, mostly lowcarb is what I read but sometimes other stuff. Let me put it together so you see how I’m coming to this point.

1. Research from a variety of sources is clearly suggesting and even saying that eating is actually driven even at the *cellular* level, definitely at the subconscious level. It isn’t about ‘willpower’; it isn’t ‘merely psychology’. See my past posts from this summer such as ‘The Skinny on Being Fat‘ for several great quotes from a leading researcher on that subject (and a few other posts around that time for other quotes).

2. Research is also suggesting that when people exercise, they generally eat to compensate for it naturally, and worse they often eat more calories (or food types they respond badly to like carbs for example) than they burned off, so aside from weight lifting building muscle, the whole concept that doing aerobics is gonna make you skinnier is pretty much bunk. So I consider that kind of exercise, though healthy for ‘conditioning’ reasons, kind of moot when it comes to weight loss.

3. Research is showing that some people at the same weight, can eat less calories and maintain that weight as someone else the same weight. So far I don’t think it’s clear whether this is across the board or only people-who-lost-weight compared to people who were already that size. But it does make the point that people at the same measure do not USE the same measure and hence need different intake.

4. Jonny Bowden talked about how when people at his old health club were put on the machine that measures, physiologically, exactly how many calories are being burned during exercise, the readings were radically different depending on the person. This ties into #3 actually; people simply use different quantities of energy to do things, and hence need different quantities of energy on food intake.

Two people of the same size eating the same things and exercising the same way, could result 5 years later in one person being fat and the other not. And of course, once all those extra or larger fat cells exist, there are other internal body side effects generated by that alone, to continually add complication.

So what I am getting to here is that the body in order to be what we consider healthy has to be SELF REGULATING because there is no way for us to measure exactly what each person needs. We can ‘try’ but as the above demonstrates, we really don’t know anything exactly, and if you add in the variable responses to different foods, you come up with a pretty unique situation for every individual.

Well, it should be self-regulating. Apparently something has gone wrong with that regulation mechanism. (Or it’s a reality creation issue, ala Jane Roberts/Seth, and it’s working fine, but our core ‘belief systems’ are screwed.) But since nobody knows how to deal with that invisible, hypothesized “self-regulation mechanism” for weight, we look to what we can SEE and try to figure it out.

(It reminds me of the thyroid thing. The pituitary gland manages other glands including the thyroid. When the thyroid screws up, it would be reasonable to look to the pituitary for the problem, just like in business you don’t yell at the guy on the line for production issues, you look to management. But we really don’t know jack about the pituitary, so medical science is totally unhelpful on that subject. So, they address the thyroid directly, even though its misbehavior is possibly (at least in some cases) a symptom of something we don’t understand, not a root cause.)

OK, so now follow me here:

A) eating is driven at the cellular or at least subconscious level.

B) our whole culture intuitively believes it’s about psychology/willpower.

C) hypnosis easily proves that people will invent a conscious “reason why” they do something even if it’s motivated at the subconscious level. Hence our culture at large and individually is likely deluded on this point.

So I propose that,

D) individuals who “emotionally eat” may actually be masking the whole process. By this I mean that they are driven to eat for physiological reasons but they are “grafting on” genuine (real) emotional issues as the “driving reason” why they feel they should and/or did eat. Rationally coming up with something to explain a behavior motivated at fundamental levels that actually have nothing to do with the surface psychology.

I think this is important, if it has any potential truth at all, for a few reasons.

1. I don’t think psychology alone can successfully treat this problem if this is the case. If the person actually resolved the emotional issues but still had the subconscious, body-driven eating drive, they would simply put something else in the reasoning list, or the caloric intake might shift its form (more even and not so binge oriented) but still amount to the same net result. Alternatively, they might actually subconsciously lower metabolism to get the same end result.

Believing that a person has emotional issues, and they eat when they’re emotional, so if they get therapy surely they’ll lose weight, there may be some truth to this, but if my theory is correct, it’s not going to solve the problem, because the root of the cause was not psychology to begin with.

2. The attempt to project obesity as a “mental condition” because in many people it is associated with a “compulsive eating” behavior, becomes more ridiculous in this light, because in reality, ANY personal issue an individual may have is likely to be “grafted on as a rationalized explanation” for why they eat badly.

An attempt to understand and treat obesity makes knowing the cause critical, and if we are looking at the eating as a cause when in fact the eating may be a *symptom* of the self-regulating body, then we wouldn’t even be looking in the right place.

3. If we really want to understand and treat the problem of being driven to eat too much or driven to eat the wrong foods, then we need to look at that issue squarely and, since if we wait for science funding that genuinely helps us we’ll likely all be dead, laymen need to do their OWN experimenting to see what works for them.

?

Some people recognize that they can eat 40 carbs a day no problem. Unless more than 25 are vegetables, in which case they actually find they are more prone to eat (or at least want) more carbs the NEXT day. (Eating them in eggs/cheese might not do that. Or vice-versa.)

Some people can eat whatever but if they eat more than about 8 carbs in sugar alcohols, the next day or two they’re more likely to want sweeter and slightly carbier things. Or just more food, period.

I think it would be good if more people actually tracked how they FELT on a given day as far as eating–for those who plan food and don’t deviate. The consistency of food may mask what one’s body was actually trying to drive them toward. There may be certain offbeat correlations that are common, such as one food invoking more ‘need to eat’ than another.

Everybody who tracks their food intake knows that sometimes you want sweeter things and sometimes you just want more food and so on. We respond as if all of this stuff is the will of God or some whim of nature. It’ll be lightly cloudy today, ok, as if we have nothing to do with it at all.

But I suspect that if researchers are right and eating really is motivated as low as the cellular level, that the stimulus-response ameoba-level issue is involved here, and what we DO eat — and what we DON’T eat — is probably a great part of WHY our body responds demanding more food, or sweeter food, or whatever. Not all of it, but maybe some.

What if for zillions of human years carbs were temporary but over a certain number indicated a certain food available in bulk, and the body got used to eating as much as possible and storing it while it existed, a great opportunity. Maybe the body reacts to a certain number of carbs, or carbs from a given kind of nutrient, based on something offbeat like that. This is a wild idea, I’m merely saying we don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like much attention is being paid to that, either.

If the body is genuinely driving eating, I’m not saying that ‘willpower’ doesn’t matter; most people can do all kinds of things their body is unhappy about in the name of discipline. But I suspect that the ability to override your body’s request with willpower, is rather like pain tolerance — quite different for each person.

(There may actually even BE a form of pain at the cellular level that is unconscious but still affects us, in fact.)

(I personally wonder if applied hypnosis for days could create any change in the metabolic burning rate of a person–it is not conscious driven, but might be influenceable anyway.)

I’m using too many words which always means I’m having a hard time getting my own head well around an idea.

But one of the points I’m going for is that I think the entire edifice of “EMOTIONAL EATING” that is such a big thing in the diet world may be inherently fallacious.

I think people may be just applying conscious stuff to their subconscious drive to eat and believing that association, when it’s a psychological artifact, not reality.

(It’s even possible that the drive to eat could help create ongoing emotional problems — or any other condition that gets a person to eat, including decisions about daily life stuff that affects the food around us or our habits — in order to ensure its own maintenance. That’s how complicated this could be.)

Just a thought for the day.

Today I’m thinking about the things that ought to make me “think”, but usually have to glide by, fly by, and then finally bite me on the butt before I actually make the trouble to think about them.

Like:

No matter what I eat that is lowcarb, I don’t usually overeat, if anything I have trouble eating enough per day of nearly any nutrient. EXCEPT. If I eat something like tacos or burritos using lowcarb tortillas, I overeat. I know I’m overeating because I feel ‘dark inside’ and too stuffed to move for quite awhile after.

Why do I overdose on this and not other things? I had to think about it for awhile.

I think it’s possible that the combination of hamburger meat (spicy in this case), shredded cheese, and the fiber from a lowcarb tortilla, is simply a lot. ONE medium burrito, or two medium tacos, is PLENTY. Yet, I usually eat twice that. Why? Because I can. Because I love the taste. Because once you get the basic stuff made and set out, it’s easy.

But really, it doesn’t matter why. What matters is that I get conscious enough about my eating habits to say, “Hey, will you look at that. I consistently overeat if the meal is tacos or burritos. Next time I make those dishes, I will be sure to plan my portions in advance.” That wasn’t so hard, was it?

***

Gluten-free stuff is high carb. Lowcarb stuff is higher in gluten. This is God’s way of telling me that rather than finding a way to have “cheat-breadishes” I just need to adapt my diet so I no longer think I NEED that kind of thing.

Here’s proof that I have not adapted to kicking sugar ‘really’: when I do carb cycling, why do I want to have high protein pasta, rather than extra broccoli?

Heh.

***

I think I can now say with some certainty that the chance of my choosing to eat something lousy when I am officially lowcarbing, is nearly always trackable not to what is tempting me, not to my mood, not to anything in that moment –

– but to what I ate 24-48 hours PRIOR TO THAT MOMENT. Yes. I’m saying that I think the body totally sets us up. I eat something and I think I am ok with it, it did not throw me out of ketosis, it did not cause instant cravings, all appears to be well. But then, 1-2 days LATER, I end up making some decision about food that is, shall we say, not the kind that is easy to “own responsibility for” later.

So when people are talking about how to stay on plan, how to be disciplined, how to resist temptation, the answer is not really, “when you have an overwhelming craving to go face-down in the pie, don’t do it.” By the time they have that overwhelming craving, there are physiological issues behind it… it’s mostly too late for moralizing about willpower. The real answer is, “Get so far off sugar in every form and anything else that saps your energy that you will not GET to the point of that overwhelming craving.”

Willpower starts at the 3-carb level.

***

When I eat gluten, it gives me asthma anywhere from 12-36 hours LATER. Not at the time! Before I went lowcarb, I never tracked gluten to asthma because I ate it all the time, so it was a chronic condition. After I went lowcarb, I knew that asthma was from something I was eating previously, probably the breads, because lowcarb forced me to stop them entirely (the first time I went lowcarb there were incredibly few ‘lowcarb’ breadish products).

The irony, of course, is that my entire life I’ve lived on bread products. “Whole grains!” I was a vegetarian for nearly 5 years. Gained weight, mostly lived on bread products and dairy since I didn’t much like fruits and vegetables. Probably torqued my hormonal balance good through serious amino/protein deprivations.

Once I was lowcarb and controlling that kind of thing better — rarely eating a breadish product, and only the lowcarb variants — I was finally able to begin to find the correlation. Eat gluten — and lowcarb bread products often have MORE of it because of the way the grain is processed to favor the protein — and not that night, but the NEXT night, and the day after that, I’d be wheezing totally.

Now, take a person who has sleep apnea — scratch that, just “apnea,” I’ve had “shallow breathing” problems even when I was a teen and thin, I think it’s a subconscious emotional suppression thing, totally aside from the physical issue that causes breathing problems mostly in overweight people — and then add heavy lung wheezing to the equation, and you get someone who is seriously oxygen deprived.

Tip: oxygen deprivation, while quite fascinating especially in serious degree, has the same effect as things like a thyroid problem or low potassium can. It can make you exhausted, sluggish, seriously forgetful (short term memory really gets blitzed, the sort of, “yes and — um — what were we just talking about??” sort), etc.

Not surprisingly, when people feel exhausted and sluggish, they don’t move as much. That doesn’t just mean they don’t run marathons as often. It also means they are less inclined to get up and go make eggs or a protein drink… if they aren’t really hungry, they might not bother. It also means they may be less inclined to do any number of things that contribute to their eating well, or a tad bit of exercise that has other life side effects (like a cleaner kitchen for example, which may affect whether 3 hours later they decide to make gluten free lowcarb highprotein muffins, vs. not doing so).

Of course, when I eat insufficient protein, I’m less energetic, I’m not retaining my muscle mass as well, and so have some of the same not as inclined to be energetic side effects.

It’s a downward spiral! It’s a catch-22².

No-brainer: When I am more exhausted, I am more inclined to seek energy from food. Read: carbs in one form or another.

***

OK, so there it is, the thought at the back of my brain trying to get my attention:

1. I eat gluten and I shouldn’t, which
2. Causes lower oxygen a day or two later, which
3. Causes more exhaustion, which tends to up my carb intake as I seek more energy, which
4. Brings on more rounds of #1 until several spirals are operating at once here, which
5. Eventually means I’m not energetic enough to go make divine lowcarb foods because either I’m too exhausted, or not energetic enough to clean my kitchen and don’t feel like cooking when it’s not clean, or I just don’t bother eating at all, which then drops my protein and nutrients, further depleting my energy, adding more to the spirals, which
6. Eventually means I’m likely to eat something offplan or simply go off lowcarb entirely.

This could be summed up like: Lowcarb is where you have lots of energy because you’re living off your plentiful fat cells. Screw it up, though, and you will naturally start eating more because humans are primal-driven to eat more when they lack energy.

Lesson: Don’t screw it up.

Additional note: the very food that has the gluten that keeps screwing it up for me (lowcarb tortillas) also happens to be part of the main meal that I am most likely to seriously overeat.

I grew up on tacos and burritos. You’d think I was mexican, in fact until lowcarb, mexican food of a variety of things was the only thing I knew how to cook! Not ‘real’ mexican food (half a roasted chicken and black beans, or spicy pork in masa wrapped in corn husks, or homemade 1/2″ thick little breads called tortillas) but ‘American’ mexican food (thin tortillas from a package and a ton of cheese! rinse and repeat in 14 variations).

I’m trying to be repetitive to get it through my own brain here.

GLUTEN IS KILLING ME. It seems like no big deal when I eat it! It seems like only a little thing even when “Oh, I have stuff in my lungs, asthma” a day later. But the SIDE EFFECTS are part of an overall downward spiral-cycle that is consistently taking me OFF/OUT of lowcarb eating.

All because… wait for it… I feel like I can’t possibly be expected to survive lowcarb if I can’t have, as a regular meal, the easy to make, kid likes ‘em too, burritos.

I should make a sign, WILL DIE FOR BURRITOS. Would this make it clear enough?

Maybe I should reframe it. Would I be sad to go overseas, be in a war, and get killed for the sake of a long list of relatively good reasons ranging from freedom to economic survival of my country? Yes, I probably would. That would be scary! That would seem like such a tragedy for me, for my family losing me. And yet, I’m willing to continue on an eating plan lifestyle that is just as certain to kill me, but in some slower, more expensive way, all so I can have a freakin BURRITO?

Am I CRAZY?!

I have been on vacation for some time, and offline to LC for awhile before that. I’ve really missed my blogging and I hope y’all are doing well.

Recently, I fell in love.

This wasn’t nearly such a big deal until I finally met my internet/phone obsession, and spent some serious quality time with him in a remote cabin in the foothills of the Ozarks, and some at home where he and my child fell in like with each other pretty quickly. That shifted it out of being one of those “Yes I totally love him but then again we haven’t met so you can’t be 100% sure of course” and into, “Why did my house never feel empty until he left it?”

Something happened that has had a fairly radical effect on my self image and how I think about everything, including my eating plan, exercise, goals in life, etc. And that is:

Someone fell in love with me.

I don’t mean to be a complete nerd, but somehow, the effects in me of feeling genuinely loved by someone are nothing short of astounding. It is as if for the first time, instead of seeing myself through the eyes of the only adults around me, family who are either apathetic or highly critical, I am seeing myself through the eyes of someone who genuinely loves and cares about me. Someone who expects good things from me, who assumes the best of my intentions and outcomes, and who totally expects me to be treated well — including by myself.

For the first time, I’m stopping in the middle of a day (or night) and asking myself: why am I doing this? Why am I not sleeping when I need to, pushing and pushing myself? Why am I not eating when I know I need to? Why am I sitting around when there are things I would like to accomplish? Why am I letting my bad behavior toward myself, that has become automatic and unconscious, run my life? Don’t I deserve better than this?

In a burst of new enthusiasm (never let it be said that finally getting great sex for the first time in your life, let alone after not having any at all for ten years, isn’t a great motivator!), when I got back from vacation, I worked out a daily schedule. You know, the sort totally impossible to keep without a drill sargeant and a stopwatch, but the kind that sounds really good on paper.

Last night I was pondering my interesting results with it so far. Which is kind of like, “I’m completely ignoring it, but intending to get to it Real Soon Now.” And I had this typical, automatic thought, “I’m screwing up, and I’ll never be getting healthier if I don’t do X daily, and …” and I suddenly realized: you know, that isn’t the point.

The point of eating well is not so you get skinnier or stronger. The point of practicing your arts is not so you get better at them. The point of doing these things is the love of doing them. Every moment of life is precious, not because we can take a photo of it, not because of what it means to our future, but because of the life-experience in-the-moment, RIGHT NOW.

I should eat well because eating well is its own reward, in the moment. I should practice my arts because doing so means that I am living the kind of quality in time that make life an enjoyable thing for me. The action of an art, whether it is music or sketching or psi work or a physical discipline, makes those moments of our life different than if we had spent them sitting still, washing dishes, doing taxes, or whatever. Every minute of our day compiles to the end result, and the net result of our days is what makes our habits, our character and even our destiny.

But the living of a day isn’t for the destiny, any more than eating low-carb is for some dreamed-of body of the future. Any more than loving others is for promise of heaven or fear of hell: one should ‘be good’ because being good is its own reward. The living of each moment is a quality opportunity. Not an obligation. Not just something to schedule or plan. Not just something to fill the time. An OPPORTUNITY to live, for that moment, to truly live–in a way that makes us feel fulfilled.

Live well, and the goals take care of themselves.

No matter what goals one may have (and goals are good), the PRACTICE, the in-the-moment, living-it, has to be focused on the appreciation of the moment. The quality of the moment, and of the end result, depend on that “Zen” ability to truly live in the moment.

In other words, if I base my today on my future, only strict and constant self discipline can get me there. But if I base today on my love of today and living well in it, I not only enjoy my day a lot more, but the future brings itself to me–and possibly with better results than I would otherwise have had.

I realized that planning to spend an hour a day with my little girl isn’t something I do because I must and because when it’s over I can send her to bed without making her feel neglected. It’s for the joy of it. Of course! But for some reason I hadn’t applied that understanding to everything else in my life. Like eating well, lifting weights, etc.

This brings me back to why I began this blog in the first place. Not because I wanted to lose weight, not because I’m a lowcarb evangelist, not because I needed another blog. But because I was delighted with how wonderful good food could be, how fun and creative it could be to work out new options for it, how exciting it could be to explore a new avenue in my life.

As a matter of course, things like goals and plans and charts and schedules and more eventually dominate most blogs including mine. But as a matter of inspiration, this blog was born because I loved the moments: the moments of discovering new stuff, of creating more new stuff, of cooking something I knew was good for me, of eating something that tasted great AND was good for me. As a side-effect, all that was good for my health and my future.

The point of a mirror is not to show us how we look to ourselves. It is show us how we look to OTHER people. When we look in a mirror and we project all our own fears and doubts and angers upon it, when people around us have contributed their own as well, it’s ‘through a lens darkly’ at best. But when the mirror changes, when it truly shows you how someone else perceives you, and they think you are smart and lovely and creative and kind and overflowing with potential for good things, that’s a different reflection altogether.

Suddenly I don’t feel so much like, “I gotta do X so someday I won’t see this horrible reflection!”

I feel more like, “Hey, that’s a reflection of me, a nice person worth treating well. I should do X because it would feel good and I deserve that. How nice it would be to be nice to me. It’s nice to be alive.”

Every morning I say, “God, thank you for my life.”

Maybe all along I should have been reminding myself that the life wasn’t just a schedule of obligations which, if I had discipline, would eventually get me to some happier, skinnier, healthier place where then I could allow myself … something, I’m not sure what. Am I waiting to be happy? Am I placing some barely-defined assumption of happiness on some hopefully thinner future ‘when I deserve it’?

Maybe I should have been reminding myself that every moment of life is a gift, an honor, and an opportunity. Not for ‘the future’ but for THAT moment.

Love is the true motivator. Not fear of bad things, not greed for good things, but genuine love, whether for self, God or others.

Any time I stop doing something I’ve been doing deliberately for awhile, I tell myself, “I’ll revert to my better habits in a day or so.” You know that feeling?

Then time goes by, and more time goes by, and eventually I realize I am completely off the wagon, and don’t particularly feel like getting back on it. So there.

And then eventually I realize that I actually kind of miss the wagon, miss feeling better, miss feeling like I’m accomplishing something, miss feeling like there is hope. I find myself mourning the loss. I find I want to get my act together.

And so then finally I actually DO it, I’m back on the wagon, I’m happy to be there, and I have a fresh enthusiasm that I obviously lacked previously around the time I hopped off. I might add that I stopped my 12 week cycle 1 week and 6.5 lbs short of my goal. I mean that’s just stupid. It’s been basically six weeks I’ve been ‘off the wagon’ and eating high-carb and not much exercising.

So today, I find myself looking at this straight-up cliff that seems somewhere between impossible, ridiculous, and unfair.

“Didn’t I already climb that cliff?” I ask myself. “I could swear I recognize how few handholds there are in that stretch, and how hard it was going up that place over there.”

“Why, yes,” says my Conscience. “As a matter of fact PJ, you DID climb that very cliff once already. Possibly twice. But then you went off the wagon, see. So those very same pounds of cliff will have to be traversed yet again. So there.”

Actually, to be honest, I’m astounded that I am only 21 lbs heavier six weeks later. I believe the majority of that is probably water/glycol-weight and likely to come off in the first couple weeks of a solid induction, taking me back to where I was when I left off. We will see.

Around July 25 is when I basically lost interest in everything that related to “me” which happened to include my food, weight, exercise, etc. Of course just around that time, the governor was out declaring my county a disaster area, the ‘walking park’ was like 30 feet underwater from the flooding, but that is no excuse for not lifting weights or eating right.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve had a lot of time to think about the stuff I blogged on a few months ago, the “fat politics” stuff. I am going to be taking my weight and the whole “weight loss” angle off the face of this blog. It is not a ’secret’ and my info can be found at my lowcarb journal, or a link I’ll put on an ‘about’ page to my weight tracking spreadsheet. But I do believe that lowcarb should be about health, and if a person is to be appreciated or congratulated for how they eat or exercise or whatever, it should be first and foremost because they are making a genuine effort toward health and happiness.

For me, that means losing weight, simply because I am not comfortable weighing what I do. I feel much better than when I weighed over 100 lbs more, I’ll give you that. But I suspect that if I continue reducing that, I’ll be better able to do fun things like karate and rollerskating again eventually, and I would really like to do that.

I don’t want the lowcarb focus to be “weight loss.” First because “fat, not weight” is much more important to focus on. Second, because lowcarb is a health regime. If a person were underweight, they would gain weight on a sufficient protein lowcarb eating plan! So it isn’t about a ‘diet’ to ‘lose weight’. It’s about improving your life via health. For me this means I lose weight. Others might gain it. Many others might not change that much, but might feel better, feel stronger, increase muscle to fat ratio.

What matters is that lowcarb is cool. The food is great, the recipes are often droolably divine, the health improvements are awesome, and the people are the greatest collection of supernice humans I’ve met in ANY field online (and I’ve known quite a few). So my blog will be changing ever-so-slightly over the next week, to shift that emphasis toward health and away from weight-loss. Just so ya know, it doesn’t mean that I am not continuing on a journey that includes that pretty front and center. It just means that lowcarb is a larger-vision that deserves a better context than the one I’ve been giving it.

But I am back on the wagon here.

Stupid freakin cliff. Now I have to climb it AGAIN.

Before I say this, I need to point out that PASTA WILL PROBABLY KILL YOU. OK, my moral duty is done.

Next, I also want to point out that Big Daddy D has a zucchini-as-pasta recipe he rates as his #1 lowcarb favorite recipe, which since his website is stuffed full of awesome recipes is probably really saying something.

I just wanted to mention kind of a trivial thing here.

Long before going lowcarb, before the carb thing was even a conscious issue for me, I had a problem with pasta. The problem was, even in my blood-sugar-oblivion of those days, I knew very well from repeat experience that pasta would make it spike and crash. For some reason, I could eat three times the carbs in other foods and not seem to have too major an effect, but eat pasta, and I would literally get dizzy and lightheaded, or if sitting down like on my bed with my laptop, might literally just pass out into sleep without ever going through the conscious decision to do that first. It was frightening.

Some time ago I bought “Dreamfields” pasta. This is said to be “lowcarb” pasta. It’s got hype all over the box, and all over the internet.

See the idea is that the processing of the grain makes the protein count much higher, and the fiber count much higher — rather like in Wheat Protein Isolate for example (a flour-type that products like CarbQuick utilize) — and hence, the resulting pasta made from that flour has enough of both to offset the more limited carb count and slow down its digestion so that it has a lesser impact on your blood sugar.

The problem is, for me, it doesn’t work.

I am not diabetic. I do seem to be insulin resistant. But there are only a couple of foods that so kick the ass of my blood sugar regulation that shortly after eating them I all but pass out, and pasta — even in limited doses — is one of them.

Since pasta with pesto was hands-down my favorite food in the universe next to pizza, the other food-that-will-kill-me as irony would have it, this is just SUCH a bummer.

I tried Dreamfield’s pasta. And I had the same blood sugar response as I get with regular pasta, basically. If it was reduced in any way, it was not measurable to me — since I’m not literally measuring the “high” of the blood sugar as diabetics do, merely reporting on my physical “nearly passed out” response to the later blood sugar drop.

I’ve heard other people report this on the lowcarb forums, including diabetics who were measuring: that Dreamfields pasta spiked their blood sugar in a way it was heavily advertised not to.

So, my 30-second hope that maybe teeeeny amounts of pasta on my higher-carb cycling days would be do-able were dashed.

But then….

Had to buy some pasta for a dinner I promised to make for the kid and her friend. Standing in the grocery, I see this pasta called Barilla Plus. Now, Barilla is the primary manufacturer of pasta in the world. They’ve probably induced more gradual diabetes than any corporation except the soda makers. But this “Plus” version, as I read it, appears to be the equivalent of Dreamfield’s: high protein, high fiber.

It doesn’t actually make any big deal about the lowcarb aspect, but that is the essential result, is less blood sugar impact from the carbs which is the whole point. So I figure since I have to buy something for the kids, I’ll try this — I’m mixing it with meat so hopefully they’ll at least have more protein.

Dinner — hamburger meat, newman’s spaghetti sauce, and penne pasta of the Barilla Plus variety, with parmesan cheese and some oregano on top — looked and smelled so amazingly good that I fell completely off the wagon and ate a bunch of it. Not just a little. A bunch.

Oddly, the “dizzy nearly passed out” feeling never happened. I felt perfectly normal and hours later, marveled.

Probably a fluke, I figured. And there was lots of meat in that dish to try and ‘balance’ the carbs better and… and it was probably a fluke. I’d love to use that excuse to try and explain why, about six hours later, I nuked a bunch of this concoction (which was very thick, between the meat and penne) and ate a whole plate of the stuff.

And still I had NONE of the “blood sugar crash and burn”-effect that I get with any other form of pasta — including dreamfields.

I ate some more of it the next day. For whatever reason, this ghoulash-like thick mix in the fridge called me like a siren — something that carbs in general don’t do, by the way, when I’m on lowcarb I am not really tempted by carby food in general. It just tasted really GOOD and was great as a quick heat-up munchie food. But still no measurable effect.

Here’s the more amazing thing. I ate two big portions of this one day, and another big portion of it the next day. And it did not seem to affect my ketosis at all.

Whether this is the meat, or the improvement of the pasta, I have no idea. But since even lowcarbers sometimes make pasta dishes for others, or have carb-cycling high-carb days, I thought I would mention this stuff.

Barilla Plus. Make it with white sauce and lots of chicken, or red sauce and lots of beef burger, if you must have it at all. (I’m sure the preference is not to have it at all, on lowcarb plans — especially if you are gluten-free!) Given that it didn’t make my blood sugar crash as-prepared, and didn’t seem to interfere with my ketosis, I think I may plan this as one of the foods I have on my higher-carb days — not in excess, just as a nice change.

I don’t really like the idea of programming myself to eat high-carb-variants, as I feel that sorta defeats the purpose of learning to eat well, but my kid is a pasta freak and it’s difficult for me to resist that particular temptation. From now on, if and when that might happen, I’m using that stuff instead.

Hey! I AM alive. Hard as it is to believe some days.

Right now I am working like 8am to 2am. It’s nuts. So I don’t have much time to write and it’s kind of hard to formulate ANY thought, let alone a decent blog post. But I will be back soon!

I have several major focuses in my life which tend to take up about 98% of my attention when they are present. At which point, everything else falls away. I go through these focuses one at a time. And when I am with focus X, everybody in focus Y and Z think, “What on earth happened to her?!” and my friends get irked at me and so on.

I guess the reality is that I am a chronically over-committed sort and I can only be with any program “cyclically”.

Alas, that seems to include an eating program. I’ve been ignoring Lowcarb for awhile now but AS OF MONDAY 9/3 I am back on a 12 week plan. I have a nifty spreadsheet for that as well as one for general tracking that I will link on my next post in case anybody else wants to use them.

I haven’t had any money for awhile (when I say that I am being quite literal) but I get paid tomorrow so can finally go shopping for REAL FOOD. Not the carbfest nightmare (Ramen is 6for$1) I’ve been eating while in temporary poverty. I know, some great bloggers have exampled how LC can be done on a budget (Regina at Weight of the Evidence) has more than one good post on that) but I don’t think I budget well enough to do it on twice that budget. It’s a good thing I have a job is all I can say.

Meanwhile back at the… er, mental world of PJ, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the stuff I blogged on some time ago regarding society bias against fat, and “fat activism” and things like that. It really moved me and made me feel quite differently about my lowcarb public stuff than I used to.

I eat lowcarb–not as often as I should–because for me, it is healthy, it tends to avoid gluten, it definitely avoids carbs, it increases my protein, and I like the food. I am much healthier when I’m eating lowcarb. I feel so sorry for people who, when they diet, are really doing nothing more than being miserable and underfed for awhile but otherwise see little benefit to it besides a slow wasting of muscle that reads on the scale as weight loss so they’re happy.

Totally aside from weighing some insane amount I am too frightened to step on the scale to rediscover, I would eat low carb because it’s good for me in so many ways. It isn’t really about weight loss. Yes, I *want* bodyfat loss — absolutely! But I want about a dozen other things just as much frankly, all of which matter too. Putting the focus on ‘weight loss’ first, is kind of misleading because it ought to be about bodyfat, not just pounds. Second, it’s kind of overbalanced because it ought to be about health, not just size. And third, it’s just incomplete, because LC is as good for me for other reasons as it is for gradual weight loss reasons.

So I think when I get some time (in a day or so–by end of this weekend latest I hope) to come back and blog properly (I have several taggings I must respond to!), I think I am going to take my weight off my blog. I’ll keep it on my journal on the forum so anybody can see it if they want, as I link to it with my screen name from here; it isn’t that it’s a secret.

Recently there was a big drama (actually I think it is quietly continuing) about an eating plan that is, off-paper and into the hands-on practice, basically a starvation diet. Well, I really want the focus on this blog to be “healthy lowcarb yummy stuff and life”, not, “the contest to lose scale-pounds by eating a certain way”, and partly that’s because this mentality about “eat this way to lose weight!” is really part of the same problem that drives people to starvation diets to begin with.

If the focus were on what is healthy for you, what makes you feel good and strong and mentally clear and physically able, then there would never be any confusion about why living on 400 calories a day might be ok. I say this as a person who regularly, if not forcibly on a lowcarb eating plan, lives on sometimes that many calories a day. That is why I’m hugely fat. I ought to be a walking testimony-of-terror to anorexic groups about what mucking up your metabolism in the most serious way can do to a person.

So I’m not saying I don’t understand. Eating is inconvenient and time consuming and in general a bother unless I have time and interest. If someone fed me, I’d eat all the time. When my laziness and busy-ness (I am over-”focused” as attention goes) has to compete with food, it often loses. So I am no saint on the food front. I’m just saying that the whole focus on butt-size compared to what goes in your mouth is really part of the problem to begin with, that causes people to starve themselves or live solely on cabbage or all kinds of other bizarre and stupid acts of hysteria to deal with fat. And meanwhile, it means that even the people who should most support the acceptance of ’size’ in our society, no matter what it is, are basically playing the same game as those against it, when the primary focus isn’t “Hey I’m healthy and happy and isn’t this eating plan great” but rather, “Here’s how much of that nasty ugly weight I’ve managed to lose.”

Maybe in reality we shouldn’t congratulate people for losing scale weight–but for improving their health, which is just as hard-won an effort for people who do this in ways like removing cream from their coffee, or getting off gluten-containing foods, or improving their vegetable intake, as for people who do it by “officially losing weight.”

My point is that the whole concept of an eating plan is life-wide. It shouldn’t really be about your butt. It should be about your health in 1001 ways, your longevity, your quality of life. Person X who is eating broccoli and roasted chicken but not losing weight if that’s the case, is working JUST AS HARD on improving his life as person Y who is eating pepperoni and frankenfoods but losing weight on the scale.

A focus on health would circumvent a lot of problems and put the lowcarb focus where it belongs. I believe this issue of putting the health goals first and weight issues second is the way it ought to be, and I plan to do that with my exercise blog as well. Which I forgot I even owned until recently. Damn, I am such a scatterbrain! Can I blame this on eating all those carbs?! :-)

It’s no surprise that sometimes lowcarb, in discussion, can become almost like a religion or something. For a ton of people, including me, lowcarb ’saved me’ and ‘has changed my life’. I’m sure you get the analogy. Anything that has that powerful an effect on people’s lives is going to at least occasionally be a hot-potato topic. (Not that we would dream of eating potatoes.) There’s “spirited debate”… at the least.

I care about the lowcarb ‘field’ online, because it’s mine, because meeting and communicating with others about it is important to me. I care about the lowcarb ‘image’ in media, because I deal with the social result of miseducation in others every day. I care about lowcarb eating ‘accuracy’ in practice, because I’ve come to understand how unhealthy eating can mess up lives, and because I’ve seen the grief and physical problems it has caused in people I care about. I just care about lowcarb, period, because I know how helpful lowcarb can be when done well.

Like any major “guiding force” in my life, I feel that I have certain physical, ethical, psychological, and behavioral obligations to meet concerning That Thing I Hold So True. When you love something, it is an honor to serve it. When you truly care about something, you care about more than the here/now of it. It becomes a larger topic; it becomes a way of life, a “path you walk”, a life-philosophy.

Recently I’ve been thinking about what this means to me, in the context of my communications online. The internet is the primary media doorway for legitimate lowcarb information. There are good books, but they are nearly buried in the quantity of bad books and misinformation. There is typical “media”, but it is so dominantly skewed in favor of money/corporatism rather than health, it’s more harm than help. What is left are people. One by one, and tens of thousands at a time, in giant ‘discussion forums’ and on blogs big and small, like this one.

After thinking about this for nearly two weeks, and thinking about what I would like to say and how I would like to say it, I think the best way is simply to present what I consider my own beliefs and ‘personal standards’ for “operating in the lowcarb world.” I am just one person, and perhaps others have different standards; well actually, they do, that much is obvious. But these are mine, for whatever it is worth to share them with my friends and potential-friends here on my blog.

Maybe if this kind of thing were considered by more folks on this road, there would be less controversy, contention and frustration in lowcarb’s internet homes.

Walking the Path: 10 Tenets of Online Lowcarbing

1. I will be honest about my practice of lowcarb.

• If I follow a given eating plan “except” some factors, I will say both clearly.
• If I implement other strategies, such as carb cycling or higher fat or lowered calories, I will say that clearly.
• If I don’t really follow a given eating plan, no matter how popular, I will not claim that I do.

I can easily put this in any forum ‘profile notes’, on a free blog page, or mention it in passing. If I fail to do this, I misrepresent both what I am doing, and what I am not doing. Lowcarb has enough misinformation, media-spawned confusion, and variants, that it doesn’t need me further murking-up the pool of clarity with an inability to just be plain and honest.

It’s me putting the food in my mouth–how hard can just being clear about it be?

2. I will be understanding about others’ practice of low or controlled carb.

• If someone is on the Burn the Fat eating plan rather than Protein Power, or South Beach rather than Atkins, I will not be so rude as to interfere with what works for them.
• Sometimes what works for us requires time and experimentation, so even if what they are doing is NOT working for them, that is for them to realize and do something about, not me. I can only ‘advise’ gently.
• I will share what works for me, but I will phrase this as ’sharing’ or ‘ideas’ when talking with others on different eating plans, not as preaching.

This is necessary to any degree of intelligent communication with other humans online, whether in forums, blogs or other. From diabetes to thyroid issues, everybody’s body is a little bit unique. What works for me isn’t what works for everybody.

Within what I consider “reason” (of something being at least potentially healthy for at least some people), I will respect that this is an individual path for all of us, and I will not mock, scold or scorn someone for choices they have the right to make for themselves.

3. Notwithstanding the above, I will not be a party to advice or environments that encourage people toward unhealthy and even seriously dangerous practices.

• Everybody has a different level of exposure to information, and a different level of understanding regarding nutrition. I will make an effort to share what I feel is valid information, for those new and enthusiastic souls who are still on a learning curve.
• I will not allow my own bad habits, such as eating unhealthy food on occasion, to become ‘justification’ for others new to lowcarb doing so. If I want to ingest nitrates or frankenfoods that’s my decision, and I can share good recipes, but counseling people new to lowcarb on why eating this crap is A-OK is not helping lowcarb or them either. Kicking the habit of eating crappy food is half the battle. If I’m selling them on why they don’t need to, that isn’t helping them, get real, that’s just selfish rationalization.
• Enthusiasm often substitutes for legitimacy in online environments and leads people down dark roads. If I see someone telling others to do something I think is unhealthy for everyone or anyone, such as eating 500 calories a day or starving entirely for example, I will share my contrary views. Politely but clearly, so people have no reason to have a bad association with the info I provide.

Nobody is an expert instantly. I will not willingly allow people new to lowcarb, or who are clearly not familiar with basic tenets of health, to be misled into unhealthy behaviors without at least providing my own input as an alternative.

The decision may be theirs, but for that to have any meaning, they must have some alternatives from which to choose.

4. I will put health and honesty before personal ego or profit.

• When two people use an eating plan and one does not get the same results, it means they are not the same human, is all. If one acts like the other is lying or cheating, it means they are more vested in their plan being “right” than in anybody’s health. I will avoid such behavior, and point it out when I see it in others.
• Should I have the opportunity to acquire something of value to me based on my communications about lowcarb, from a job to advertising monies to editorial rights to internet ’staff’ authority, I will use it for good, not evil. I will consider the first three “points of the path” to be even more important in direct correlation with how big an influence I may have on others.
• I will strenuously avoid anything even close to a conflict of interest, and I will openly disclose, such as in a constant signature, any formal affiliations I have with any group, company or organization which might potentially bias my communications.
• If I cannot avoid some major conflict of interest, such as blogging about something that pays me for example, I will make a blog just for that, I will point out clearly near the top what my association / affiliation is, and I will not attempt to run what might amount to “blogverts” (blog posts) or forum posts under the heading of allegedly balanced reporting on a personal blog. If I’m making a serious profit off it or my ego or reputation is tied to it, then it cannot be considered truly unbiased by any stretch.

There is enough misinformation and conflicts of interest in the mainstream media and mainstream medicine. Do I really need to add to that with my own brand of lowcarb greed or disingenuity?

I want to help the lowcarb online world online toward clarity in all areas–not muddy it for my own potentially selfish purposes.

5. I will not abuse any ‘power’ that my lowcarb communications give me.

• If I keep a blog, and I allow anonymous (which can also just mean “doesn’t have a blogger account”) comments, I will not then verbally abuse people for using that option.
• If I keep a blog, and I allow comments, I will not refuse to post comments with critique (or only post comments with critique that say, ‘you probably won’t post this’, to make it look like I’m honest, but then withhold others). There is a difference between spam/trolls and honest if snarky or angry feedback. For me to “secretly editorialize” by only letting certain comments through would be to essentially lie to all my blog readers by misrepresenting the actual interaction on my blog. This completely contradicts the whole nature of honest blogging and I will not be a party to that.
• If I blog something, and someone comments negatively on it, and I choose to change that blog content, I will make a note in the blog post itself, such as striking out the old text and then saying, “Edited to:” and then putting the new text. I will not change my text without notice once someone has commented on that part of the text. I will especially not then pretend a commenter was deluded or wrong for having commented on “what I didn’t say” if in fact, I had definitely said it when they made the comment. That is not just violating ‘honest blogger ethics’, it’s a form of blog-fraud. I won’t do it.
• If I should be given staff power in any website, whether one of my own or one I work with owned by someone else, I will not modify the content of anybody else’s online materials, such as for example taking a negative comment toward me, and rewriting it into a positive comment toward me. This is not mere ‘lack of honesty’, this is actual fraud. I won’t do it.

Communication is all that exists on the internet. If communication cannot be trusted to be honest according to its own alleged policies, that internet outlet is more harm than help to lowcarb as a whole. This kind of thing is sometimes buried in a lot of hype and volume and popularity, but eventually, net-karma comes around.

Staff, editors and bloggers who behave that way will get less support and respect in the very community where that ought to matter most, and to the very people, such as leaders of the field, to whom their reputation as low-carb media online ought to matter most.

6. If I must complain, I will attempt to do so based on issues, not personalities.

• If person A is a numbskull for suggesting the Cinnamon Toothpick Diet as a healthy alternative to weight loss, I will not attack person A for being a numbskull. Rather, I will attack the Cinnamon Toothpick Diet for being moronically unhealthy. There is a difference, no matter that these things might be related.
• If Person B has a history and presentation that suggests somewhere there is probably fraud, based on things like their student-success-stories seeming like doctored photos, their own timeline of claims being inconsistent, their own bizarre refusal for years to share evidence of their much-vaunted success, or their own before and after photos appearing to be different people and/or reverse age-dates, then I will pick on all those issues as I wish, but I’ll pick on the issues, not the person.
• It is not my job to stalk Person A or B because I ’suspect’ he or she is a cheat, liar, fraud, idiot, etc. It is however perfectly within my rights to question and discuss those “issues” in the lowcarb community at large. Should it turn out those issues find proof, I would then be within my rights to report the person to authorities or expose them in my media, but it still would not be because of the person, it would be because of the issues. Stalking is personal. Issues are not.
• If someone disagrees with me on a forum, I will take this to mean they disagree with me. I will not take this to mean they woke up this morning determined to ruin my day because they are evil. Debates, no matter how spirited, do not need to be personal. If they are about ‘perspective’ (opinion) and not ‘facts’ (information), then yes, they might get a *little* personal, but I will try to refrain from calling people numbskulls. In public, anyway.
• If I choose to post something on my blog about an issue making me mad and centered on an individual place or person, I will address the issue at large. If I call someone or something a name, it will be something that I simply feel communicates, with humor, my opinion. Such as “Kimorexia” for the insane-lowcal plan variants (and constant advice toward that and fasting) in the Kimkins diet, or “the Fatzi Regime” for the overwhelming cultural bias against fat people. I will not however address individual people or places as Nazis or SOBs because, well, that would be juvenile and ridiculous. One is a statement on a thing; the other is a statement on people.

Conversation with ten other people is difficult enough, never mind with 10,000 other people on a forum. Lowcarb is a great thing, and most self-education people get about it besides a few books, is via online forums and blogs, so keeping those forums and blogs to the point of education instead of nasty flames or abuse, is important.

People do not learn from information packaged in a post that offends them.

7. I will work to walk the fine line of supporting people who need it, yet not supporting dysfunctional or addictive behavior.

• I am happy to encourage someone to keep on, to start anew, to recognize what they do well. I will not however let my time get sucked into someone repeatedly whining about how they just can’t get their act together for their health. I am sorry about that, and I’ll work to be a good model and supporter, but I’ll not become an internet codependent for their issues. It doesn’t help either of us.
• I will be honest about what I think, within the bounds of diplomacy a given environment requires. If I think someone really should read the damn book before asking everyone to sum up 300 pages in a forum sound-byte, I will say so. I do lowcarb and its people no service by catering to those who refuse to bother with self-education. That mentality is doomed from the start anyway.
• If I think person A is being unfair to person B, I will make a point to say so if I have time. Both people and all onlookers only know the views of those who share. Too often, people think the world is against them just because one person disagreed in a poor way and nobody else said anything. I will work to be sensitive to how people feel about this kind of thing and to support people who need it when I can.
• I will work to understand and support that people have unique metabolism and biochemistry issues, lose weight at different rates, and even need or don’t need to “fall off the wagon” at different rates. A young person who is busy and lives alone can often do lowcarb far more easily than an older sedentary person who has a house filled with junk for their spouse and others and constant church/social/family eating environments. That is just the way it is. I admire anybody who “keeps on keeping on” with their dietary plan; perfection with it is admirable, but since lifestyles are as different as bodies, it is not fair to bias against those who aren’t perfect.
• I will take full responsibility for my own decisions. If I blow it and eat crappy food, it’s because I chose to. Usually the reason has more to do with eating properly in the 48 hours prior to that decision, than it has to do with the ‘event’ of the decision itself, and anybody lowcarbing for very long ought to realize that. But the decision was mine. I will own my decisions and not try to project responsibility for them onto family members, birthday parties, etc.

Strength of character is part of result of accomplishment in lowcarb as well as anything else. We get nowhere by playing the victim. If we eat well and weight loss is slow or worse, that is fair to whine about. If we choose to eat pizza every 10 days and weight loss is slow or worse, that’s our own doing.

Responsibility is the key to power.

8. I will attempt to promote lowcarb in a way that matches the environments I choose.

• Online forums and blogs all have their own ‘mood’. No forum is required to give free reign to people who don’t communicate in a way that meets their standards. They own it, that’s policy. It’s no different than going into the house of someone of a different culture, or religion: while in Rome, do as the Romans do, as the saying goes. I will not use the F-word in comments on family-natured blogs, and I will not be harshly snarky in kinder-gentler forums, although I might do either in areas where that is more appropriate.
• If I am in the no-carb forum I will not wax on about the glory of Broccoli and avocados. They do not care and they don’t really want to hear it. If I’m in the low-carb forum I will not wax on about why vegetables are pointless and unnecessary. They are low-carb using veggies for what they get, not no-carb. If I’m in the journal of someone doing the South Beach diet, I will not wax on about why even brown rice sucks for blood sugar. This is just not the time or place. Being ’supportive’ in an inappropriate place usually equates to being argumentative or even a troll. All things in balance.

Even inside the low-, no- and controlled- carb “field” on the internet, there are substantially different approaches. It is possible to support them all, or at least ignore the ones of no interest, without offending others. A lot of people desperately depend on the ideas, education and support they get online. Online-warfare drives a lot of people off, and this can literally affect their likelihood of staying on plan.

Communication is supposed to be for at least two people. If it’s only for me, it’s just self-absorption.

9. I will not willingly or openly support individuals, companies, groups or products which I feel either do harm to lowcarb, or violate the most basic tenets of online decency that the lowcarb field has a right to expect and well deserves.

• If I consider a forum’s staff abusive, I will not link to them or participate on their boards.
• If I consider a blogger’s behavior unethical, I will not link to them or participate in their comments.
• If I consider a company or product to be unhealthy or unethically promoted, I will not link to them or let pass their promotion without comment.

There is a saying that goes something like, “The only thing that is required for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.” As big a pain in the butt as it sometimes is, and as politically incorrect as it sometimes is, I feel morally obliged to do something. Maybe not loudly, maybe not abusively, maybe not while naming names, because I wish to focus on issues, behavior and facts more than personalities.

I will not be a passive party to wrongdoing or things I feel are a detriment to lowcarb’s media, online field or communications.

10. I will constantly work to see the positive in the eating plan that is healthy for me, and I will attempt to use any influence I have to display the positive and the healthy.

• I will not whine about the fact that I cannot have rice, or apple pie. I will rejoice in the fact that cauliflower can make a mock ‘chicken fried rice’ that rocks, that zucchini can make a mock ‘apple cobbler’ tht rocks, and do my best to share recipes and enthusiasm both online and offline.
• I will not whine about the fact that eating Gluten causes me allergic response and gluten-free flours are high-carb. (Ok… not much. :-)) I will instead work on finding and coming up with great lowcarb recipes that are also gluten free and share them with others.
• I will not whine about the fact that at least mild exercise is eventually needed for decent ongoing weight loss, muscle retention, and general health. I will instead work to find whatever level and type of it I am capable of doing, and share my enthusiasm with others about it. Even if I have to manufacture enthusiasm nightly to get myself to pick up that dumbbell.
• I will not whine about how lowcarb is just so hard because the world surrounds me with sugar/carb-laden foods and food-based holidays. Everybody is in that situation. The Amish and Vegetarians and Kosher folks manage to eat what they should despite other things calling their names, so why should it be so much more unfair for lowcarbers? If I want sweet crepes and ice cream I will do my best to find or create a lowcarb version of this that allows me to feel pampered and decadent, while not screwing up my health or that of others I’m feeding it to.

Lowcarb isn’t a food prison, it’s an amazing opportunity to truly explore a lot of awesome food choices here on “God’s Green Earth” that most of us completely missed in our Mac&Cheese/McDonalds upbringings. But for most people new to it, or those who have operated mostly alone rather than in big online forums, it can be a sort of sad food experience. This is their lack of education about what is possible, is all, and I can help improve that. That doesn’t mean I’ll never have a recipe with a processed food ingredient in it. It just means I’ll work very hard to have recipes, instead of references to packaged lowcarb junkfoods.

I want to provide encouragement and enthusiasm to others about eating real, healthy foods that not only taste good but do good for their bodies.

There’s probably some things I left out. But these are the ten primary tenets that I consider most important to online interaction concerning lowcarb.

If you like them, link to them, to “remind” others. Or make your own.

I think it’s a worthy effort. The more we care about the ‘online lowcarb field’, the healthier IT is likely to be.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a closet sociologist of sorts. One of the things I’ve read and studied (informally) a lot in my life is that of group psychology, from family systems to other group dynamics. This naturally ties into ‘cult psychology’, because really, that is just human nature.

Every group has a ‘group-think’ or it wouldn’t be cohesive enough to call it a group. It’s only the “degree” of group-think, and some of the other conditions present, that start gradually moving a group toward ‘cultism’.

The definition of a cult is rather severe with several points, and I won’t bore you with it. Unless we find God in Protein, and/or convince ourselves we were the only ones on the planet with the only answer to salvation or survival, no eating plan membership could qualify fully as a cult by formal definition.

Some can darn sure do the hokey pokey that direction though.

***

There are a few things I should talk about up front, that I think predispose some people to being more vulnerable to ‘influence by environment’.

First, I think most of us have noticed, on lowcarb forums, that the strength of independence varies a great deal in the participants. There are people who would walk off a cliff with wide eyes if someone who sounded convincing enough led them that way, vs. people who can be given 60,000 bytes of text with research references and still won’t buy it if they didn’t experience it themselves. Most people are somewhere in between. But it is clear that by personality profile, some people are just a lot more susceptible to the danger of misinformation from others. Some of this may depend less on the personality than the era in their life. Eras of trauma, exhaustion or emotion can make almost anyone think in a simplified manner that appreciates greatly simple packages of clear info or steps we can follow and a leader.

Next, I think that some of us who are readers, forget that not everybody is. We are perfectly happy to gradually wade through books with information on nutrition and the body, read journals and/or blogs and more, and so when someone approaches us selling bridges, we can usually debate them under the table with two fingers on the keyboard and our eyes closed. But not everybody is a reader, so, many people are far more unaware of basics than we can imagine. It isn’t that they are stupid. We think from seeing the same info that the conclusions are obvious, but in reality, we are using tons of minor ‘passive data’ sitting in our brains to help us, and they don’t have that resource. Most of the time, they ‘could’ have it — they have often read the same threads we did that had the information — but because they are not readers, their comprehension and/or retention skills may be low. Not to mention that some people are unused to the quantity of data on the internet, and it pretty much overwhelms them.

I also think that people who are critical thinkers, often fail to account for the fact that many people are not. Again, this is not any sort of diss about people who are not. Everybody has their own kind of intelligence. Some of the most wise and beautiful souls I have ever known were totally non-intellectual. It doesn’t matter. But this particular trait goes a long way toward the first thing I mentioned: when one is not in the mode for critical thinking, even if that’s because they are just so filled with despair at a situation or hope for a solution or whatever, once the critical element shuts down, they are the Cliffwalkers of Carbism, just waiting for some bozo to assure them that living on a celery stalk a day is really good for you, and off the cliff they go.

***

Critical Thinking

The irony of this is that it involves my father, who is one of the more intelligent people I know. But for some reason, some people just have subjects they don’t “think” very hard about, and others they do I guess.

One day I went over to my father and stepmother’s house. They had been watching a 20/20 episode, and they were hot to tell me the latest dirt on my low-carb eating plan. “Low carb diets can be really dangerous!” they told me. “They are high protein and too much protein can be bad for you! It can give you kidney stones!”

They looked at me as if expecting a kidney to burst in me any moment now.

“I see,” I said. “Can you tell me: 1. How much protein do low carb diets recommend for a given body weight? and 2. How much protein was found to be dangerous for that given body weight?”

They had no idea. Of course. The show didn’t tell them that.

So for all they know, it could be 320g of protein before a 150lb woman was shown as harmed in research, and the LC plans may recommend 90g for that weight, so the whole ‘lowcarb/ high protein diets can be bad for you!” can be a hysteria that is not even applicable because LC would never have suggested that to begin with.

They were sorry they brought it up.

Damn right. Heh.

But many people watching that show, just like people reading lowcarb forum boards, might have come away with exactly what 20/20 wanted them to: the spoon-fed sound-byte that “lowcarb highprotein diets are dangerous ’cause “too much protein” can give you kidney stones.” The problem was not their absorption or retention of information. In fact, both separate factoids — that lowcarb diets tend to be high protein (I would say ‘adequate’), and that ‘too much protein can give you kidney stones’ — are true enough.

It’s simply that they don’t connect to each other, because lowcarb plans such as Atkins or Protein Power don’t recommend a quantity of protein that would be dangerous. 20/20 deliberately ‘made’ them fit together, glossing over that chasm in the middle so viewers didn’t have any reason to think of it — unless they were thinking critically. Which most people don’t do a lot of while watching TV. Especially if they don’t know anything about the subject. Lots of people in low-carb-land, especially those fairly new to it, or who have never read much about it, don’t have any idea what questions to ask.

Their concept of how lowcarb works is basically “magic math.” Carbs below 30 = weight loss occurs.

Food Lists

I have a close friend who IM’d me not long ago and told me she was on a cabbage diet. Seriously. This woman is extremely intelligent (despite holding a degree in Dumb Blonde Behavior, which is even more impressive since she’s asian). I couldn’t believe it. After days of eating nothing but boiled cabbage, she wasn’t feeling very well.

Gee I wonder why.

When I mentioned lowcarb, she began asking about it. But much as I tried to cover minimal basics in an IM box, replete with pleas to read the book and visit an LC forum, she kept trying to twist it into something else: the 10 Commandments of Food.
“So I can eat mangoes right? Those are low carb.”
No, not remotely.
“I thought they were. But it’s a fruit, you don’t mean fruit is bad for you?”
You’re missing the point. It’s about carbohydrates. Here’s an amazon.com link to a great book of nutrition counts.
“So what can I eat?”

For her, it was never going to be about counting carbs or protein grams, not without my providing a one-click brain download. (She’s pretty psychic. That could happen.) For her, any ‘diet’ is a food list.

I think that’s why eating plans that present it like, “Eat a palm-sized piece of meat, poultry or seafood” do well on the market. People can understand that. It is much less complicated than “4 oz of protein” or worse, “around 20g of protein at each of four meals.” Given the trouble people have with this simple math, I sometimes wonder how most people balance their checkbooks, but then I remember that I manage my money by how much my online account shows is still sitting there, which means I have zero room to talk.

***

Let us say that you join a lowcarb forum, and you meet lots of new people. Many of them are very nice, and some of them you think are smart or witty, and a few of them you feel like might be soul-friends you just didn’t meet till now. You share an eating plan and you talk about your food details and your daily efforts, and eventually everything else in your life like your kids and husband and pets and life events and late-night neurosis nobody else will talk to you about. You bond with several of them and you have a lot of fun seeing what’s in their life and talking to them, and you all get ‘excited together’ about what you’re doing on your eating plan because sure, that’s part of why congregating brings inspiration.

***

I’ve watched highly intelligent people, working on understanding their bodies, over-absorb all kinds of advice. Someone says it works for them, and they’re willing to try it. They’re high fat, they’re low fat, they’re coconut oil magic, they’re soy, they’re against soy, you name it.

Now much of this is normal. We have to work on how our bodies react to different foods. Most of us had no idea until we began an eating plan and started paying attention. Many of us had spent our whole lives eating foods we were actually intolerant to. Who knows what better weight we’d have had if we knew sooner!

But there is a fine line that separates “willing to try advice” and “willing to try advice that is unhealthy.”

The problem is, a lot of people don’t have enough knowledge of how the body functions to make intelligent evaluation of when advice is good or bad.

Most the time, trying a new thing or avoiding a certain thing is not going to hurt anybody, even if it’s not perfect for that individual. It’s all experiment. It’s all a work in progress.

***

Sometimes, a strong influence comes along. Someone who is very communicative, opinionated and even insistent, who goes out of their way to help others and walk them through the plan. That’s a good thing, yes? It’s great when people make the effort to help others. It’s damn time consuming. It’s a genuine gift of self.

When someone who claims phenomenal success at their weight loss and health efforts makes an effort to walk others through the process, it doesn’t just make a helper; it makes a hero.

When that hero becomes a philosophical and practical leader by example, it doesn’t just make a teacher; it makes a guru.

***

In the lowcarb world, the gurus have invariably been medical professionals. Richard Atkins was a cardiologist. Drs. Mary Dan and Michael Eades are endocrinology specialists (I think). The “Dr.” in front of the name of most anybody who is a proponent of ANY eating plan (even the most horrifying sorts) is the norm.

When someone shows up in a forum and you find out they lost 60 lbs (and that’s not counting a big gain in muscle) and they look utterly fabulous (such as the divine Amory), it’s easy to get a little starry-eyed about them. I know most of you are like me: you look at all the before and after photos and can’t get enough of it; it’s like visual inspiration, testimony to we-could-do-it-too-ness, a relief to have confirmation it’s possible. We all want that kind of success.

Thanks to the internet, now people who have no actual health credentials can become experts, based mostly on experience for their expertise.

But what if they just claim experience? This is the internet. What if it’s all a lie? Kimkins is a perfect example. Multiple counts of outright fraud but it just goes on and people buy it.

Or what if it’s true, but some obscure thing that worked for Jane, has the worst possible effect on you? Jane isn’t a doctor and isn’t using research to back her; she just rightfully talked about what worked for her. But your body isn’t her body and there’s no telling what will be the same and what won’t when it comes down to the details. I’ve spent years watching people on the same eating plan, working their butts off on it, have completely different results. Bodies are individual.

And then there’s the social pressure. In some forums or areas, it’s very hip to like vegetables, while in others, only meat-meat-meat is truly cool. People can be influenced in their eating just by the “popular fashion” on discussion boards.

But no matter what someone else does, it’s all about what works for you. In the end, it comes down to experiment. Try it for a little while. Evaluate the results. Probably no extreme is good for the long term, but who knows. Variety seems to be one of the things the body was designed to expect, so change it up now and then. Avoid the traps of group-think that are present even in the best places. No matter how smart the group is, your body is an individual. Let it be heard above the crowds.

We’re pretty much culturally indoctrinated to think that all weight problems relate to too-much-food intake. That the real exercise needed for weight-loss is “push-aways”. So it seems like a no-brainer that if you want to be thinner, you eat less.

This concept is so ingrained in most of us that even when we KNOW, intellectually, that we need to eat calories ‘near’ our basal metabolic rate in order to prevent our metabolism slowing down, it is often difficult to do.

Even though we may KNOW that for our body (this is my case) we need to eat regularly throughout the day, the more often the better, still, STILL!!, it is difficult to do it. At least for me. I’m working on that.

So, from late May to earliest June, I actually ate food. Not perfectly, no, forgot my supplements, should have had more water, failed the eat-every-3-hours test, but in general, every day I ate around 3 times. I was just restarting lowcarb eating. My calories should have been higher but they weren’t terribly low.

I recovered from my months of high carb eating, and lost 24 lbs the first week, which is merely water/glycol of course, not fat. When I dropped the carbs, my body dropped the water it holds to process them.

From early June to the end of June, my eating sucked. There were a few days that I ate a few times and made it to nearly 2000 calories, but by few I mean… maybe three days out of that month. Most the time, I forgot to eat… I might get a couple slimfasts down a day… I just wasn’t getting nearly enough calories. The new ketosis had killed my appetite, plus I’m lazy for cooking, and I have some issue with not-eating as a control thing I think (working on it!), so suffice to say, my calories were way too low and my eating frequency was too.

In the whole of June, my weight varied all over the map of 10 lbs up or down, as if my body couldn’t decide what to do, and refused to go much under that. Usually when my eating fails like that, I don’t vary so much, I just don’t lose anything at all. Period. By the end of June, I had lost: 1 pound. Yep. Four weeks, 1 pound. For someone who allegedly has a BMR of nearly 4000 calories a day, and was only eating <1000 for nearly a month, that is not quite simple math.

Late on July 1 I decided to get with the program and really start eating more regularly. It still was imperfect, my calories still low, but I made more of an effort to eat more often and/or to eat more food each day. The next day I began that time of month, so my weight went up 10 lbs which is normal for that. I kept on working on eating more regularly. Even if that meant having a couple tablespoons of peanut butter, I tried to eat SOMETHING every few hours.

As of today, five days later after I began eating halfway decently again, my weight ‘whooshed’ down fifteen pounds — finally for the first time breaking that seeming roadblock range. The only difference is that I finally started eating more calories, and more often.

I have seen this repeatedly over my several cycles of lowcarbing. If I don’t eat enough, I don’t lose weight, even though my BMR is ridiculous. When I make a POINT to eat many times through the day, and at least a couple thousand calories, the weight begins coming off.

Since this contradicts the idea that if we just eat fewer and fewer calories we’ll get skinnier in no time, I thought I’d make a point to post about it.

***

Click on the pic for Pink’s Video. It’s a spoof of modern females in the media and the body obsession.

I’m excited for my progress again. Finally!!

Why IS it that some people are fat and others are not?

Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University, said:

…if you think about it in general terms, you can explain differences in weight in the population based on three possibilities.

…one possibility would be that the obese lack will power; this is a point of view favored by lean people, I generally find.

The second possibility that people consider is that we live in a toxic environment and that it’s the environment’s fault.

And then the third possibility is that there are biological drives that lead us to eat what we eat, and ultimately weigh what we weigh, in the same way as some of us are tall and some of us are short, others of us are destined to be heavy and others lean.

…I think most moderate scientists believe that of course that all three can be relevant, but that biology has really an underappreciated role in accounting for difference in weight, and we know a lot about the system now and so I think there’s a powerful set of data that supports that point of view.

{Ira Flatow: So when people are fat and they’re overweight, there is a major genetic factor here. It’s not as simple as saying “I have no will power” or “I tried the diet, doesn’t work.” There could be real hard wiring that’s the problem.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: …some of the most powerful evidence that this is a biological problem and not a “behavioral one” (in quotation marks) is genetics. And so there are a number of ways to assess the genetic contributions to a trait. It turns out if you look for obesity it is probably the second most heritable trait, second only to height, with which it is quite close. Based on estimates that can be done by analyzing twins, 80 percent of the variability in weight can be accounted for by genetic factors.

Good grief! 80%? That’s…. huge. So much for the just ‘eat less exercise more!’ solves-all-fat line.

Friedman points out that the belief in leanness is a modern thing, and implies that the expectation that everyone should be thin is itself nonsense:

…Historically, being obese was the desirable body habit as so. If you go to museums… all the rich people in Egypt would pay extra money to have extra chins put onto their sculpture. Rubenesque figures were the vogue in the 1700s. Renoir’s characters were all heavy. In aboriginal societies the chieftains were all quite obese. For reasons that — you all have as good an idea about as I do I guess –- things changed here about what our views of what was attractive in the 60s and it set up an idealized view of what people should weigh and who they should be that just isn’t matched by our genetic endowment.

…The problem is not that small amounts of weight that improve health can’t be achievable; I think it can be. The problem is that’s not what most obese people want or the public wants. The public wants to be normal weight. And so I would much prefer to see that the dialogue and the issue center on improved health and achievable goals rather than setting up some societal construct that says everybody has to be perfectly wonderfully thin, a wish that really runs counter to almost everything science has to tell us about this problem.

I think people should make their best efforts but recognize, but not be prejudicial about the fact, that for many people most of the things you do aren’t going to work. And so my argument is not “we shouldn’t think about the problem, we shouldn’t address it.” The issue has to do with “what are we going to do about it.” And so I would argue what we shouldn’t do is fall back on simple nostrums like “eat less, exercise more.”

And here he talks a little more about the weird social stigma that obesity has, and how illogical it is from a medical science perspective:

I think that to the extent that increased weight has health consequences, people should do their best. It certainly is a good thing to be fit. And it is a good thing to eat a heart healthy diet. And it’s probably a good thing to make one’s best efforts to keep one’s weight under control. So that means not doing much different than what Hippocrates would have recommended. But I think at the same time we have to recognize that those measures are rather limited in their efficacy and that to make the leap therefore that people who are not successful at keeping their weight off are at fault is just wrong headed. And there are all kinds of attributes about each of us that might draw the next person to draw a conclusion about them. But to draw conclusions about obese people, I think, is unenlightened to say the least about what their personal characteristics are.

(Ira Flatow: So to stigmatize them is sort of making fun of the situation that they don’t have much control over.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: I think that’s right and the ironic thing is that I think the more of an outlier one is for weight, the more obese, the more difficult it would be to actually normalize weight. And so if anyone should be stigmatized it would be someone like me who could easily lose 10 lbs. and doesn’t. I think for the people who are really significantly overweight, it’s just who they are — to a very, very large extent.

… It’d be much better to forget about the stigma and assume people weigh what they weigh, and then encourage people to do what they can to improve their health.

Back to Genetics, he said:

…So when you see a very obese person walking down the street there’s a very, very significant possibility that that individual just has a genetic alteration that makes them so.

(Ira Flatow: So all those years when you saw a very obese person and they said, “I have a glandular problem,” they were telling the truth in a certain sense genetically speaking.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Well I think so. They just didn’t know which gland.

Then he got into some interesting stuff about how the functioning of a morbidly obese body is in many cases simply working differently than others. He used gastric bypass patients for this example.

(Question from the audience 1: When someone has a surgical intervention such that a massively obese person of, let’s say, 400 lbs. or 500 lbs. removes part of his colon and attains a weight more normal to his size, for his height. Does that rewire the person or does that then remold itself into the norm and the body strives to achieve the larger weight yet again?)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: …there’s another feature of this surgery that people, I think, ignore, and it’s this: when you do this procedure you limit the intake of a person to about 700 calories a day. Just so you know, none of you could consume 700 calories a day for very long; it is a very small number of calories. Despite that fact, these people still end up being clinically obese at the other end of the procedure. They lose a lot of weight but they would still on average be definable as significantly obese on average after the procedure.

Now think about it, they’re eating 700 calories a day and they’re still obese. I mean if that doesn’t say that there’s something metabolically different about the obese than the lean, I don’t know what does.

Geez. Me neither.

I can tell people, “I have tracked 3-4 weeks, repeatedly, of my food intake, and my BMR is allegedly like 4000 calories a day minimum, and I’m eating usually <1200 calories a day IF that, AND lowcarb… and not losing weight.” And plenty of them think I’m lying. I’ve actually had people suggest that if only I’d keep a food diary like they do in weight watchers (note: I *do*, or how could I be ‘tracking’ it??) that surely I would see all kinds of calories I didn’t know about. As if 3,000 calories is easy to hide, for someone who has to work hard just to successfully eat 1000-1200 calories a day! My biggest problem is getting my butt into the kitchen to eat anything at all. So it’s not like I’m grazing through fields all day and might ‘forget’ that ‘Oh yeah, I ate 3 pizzas or something while grazing through the lettuce greens!’, sheesh!

A reference was given me once of a Dr. Phil (I think) episode, where he tells this woman claiming the same thing that she defies the laws of nature, and then “discovers” from her husband that she is drinking thousands of calories a day in soda that she “didn’t think counted.” What a setup. She’s an idiot, yes, but I felt the producers worked hard to find some way to invalidate that and maintain the calorie-myth … tabloid journalism, essentially.

It’s basically insulting. I mean, I’ve had people argue what they are sure about on-paper. They heard it, or read it. Or, they are a fairly normal metabolism bodybuilder who gained weight from sheer overeating after leaving high school sports or something, and hence when they quit overeating and started working out again, it fell off. It is just not the same.

They think it’s a mathematical impossibility. I wish someone would find a way to communicate to the metabolic system how bad it is at math. I’m getting weary of people who would not doubt my intelligence or integrity on any other issue, acting like they’re sure I must be lying or deluding myself about what I eat, because they just can’t understand the calorie-math and why pounds aren’t dropping off me at the speed of light.

The more quantity of food and more often I eat, as long as it isn’t excessively of course, the more I lose weight. It’s hard to do, after my whole adult life of eating once daily in the evening.

If they’re consuming 700 calories every day they’re going to be expending more than that. And so what you would find, you would expect to see is as long as they’re that imbalanced they’re going to keep losing and losing and losing and losing. That’s not what happens in these people; they plateau and they stop losing weight at what is definable as a significantly obese level. Now, if I had that procedure you probably wouldn’t see me in profile anymore because I would just get so thin. That’s not what happens to these people and it appears that in the face of reduced intake the body shuts down caloric expenditure and they can’t lose any more weight.

But it’s all about the ‘basal metabolic rate’ right? How much exercise you get? He pops the balloon of what I call The Calorie Lie: the belief that to maintain obesity once must eat huge quantities of calories.

This is what sets me off most about conversation with people who seem to assume that every day I proactively DO SOMETHING to STAY fat. Sheesh!

Now this next part is pretty depressing, if eye-opening. This actually goes back to what Jonny Bowden was saying about how they used to measure the detail ‘calories burned’ by exercise, and it varied radically by person and was way outside what was ‘assumed’. According to Friedman, people who are obese and lose some weight (whether this is because they are obese or, more likely I just assume, this is part of WHY they are obese) actually burn FEWER calories in order to maintain the SAME weight as someone else who did not lose weight to get to the same place:

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: So it turns out – and this was some lovely work done by Jules Hirsch here at Rockefeller [this study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, measured the metabolism of people who lost weight through a precisely controlled diet] –] it turns out they burn many fewer calories than you would predict based on their newer weight.

So let me put a finer point on this. Imagine you’re 250 pounds. and you lose 100 lbs. to 150 lbs. Now you ask how many calories does that person burn compared to someone who started out at 150 pounds.They burn like 300 or 400 calories fewer per day when they’re at that reduced weight. Now think about it. That person is hungry and now can only eat fewer calories than the equal weight person to maintain that weight, despite the fact that they weigh the same amount.

So just like Jonny said about how the calories burned in exercise was not consistent between different people, here Friedman makes clear, that even on a daily overall metabolic ratio (not just a limited exercise event), the amount of calories burned is not consistent between different people of the same weight. So Jane and Nancy, if eating the same things, and exercising the same amounts, may result eventually in a fat Jane and a slim Nancy, with no apparent behavioral difference.

And it’s possible that this “biases against Jane keeping that weight off.” Because eating identical food with identical exercise at the same body weight at point 1, a year later, Jane would be at least 36.5 lbs heavier. Multiply that by a few years and you have a very fat Jane, who never once needed to ingest pounds of bon-bons regularly in order to end up morbidly obese.

More:

(Ira Flatow: What about the other parts that control metabolism? Is it true that some people burn food faster and so it’s not the brain part and it’s just their thyroid, or whatever it is?

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: A very classic study was done about 15 years ago by a guy named Claude Bouchard. And Claude gathered up a set of identical twins and overfed them 1,000 calories a day for 84 days. And he asked what happened. So these people were in a room, they were given calories, they were forced to eat 1,000 extra calories a day; they should have put on a lot of weight. Some people put on a lot of weight, other people put on hardly any weight at all.

And when they looked, the twins were highly similar to one another, suggesting that there was some genetic predisposition to either put on weight or not put on weight when you were given extra calories. The people who didn’t put on weight activated metabolism because of metabolic circuitry and didn’t put on the weight. And this observation that some people can eat whatever they want and never put on weight and other people put on weight just by looking at it has been more or less proven based on that study, which actually was observed as far back as the 1700s.

Friedman said, regarding the twin studies, that the opposite variant of twins had also been studied, and it STILL comes out to being, at root, a genetic predisposition to gain weight or not, overwhelmingly, not environmental:

…they were then redone with identical twins reared apart compared to fraternal twins reared together. So you’re actually biasing against the identical twins so now the hereditability falls from 80 percent to 70 percent. Still 70 percent — and the other 30 percent could not be accounted for by the environment for those kids.

And finally, he referred to studies on adopted children, to see if it’s entirely about the environment provided by parents, e.g., take a fat mother, with fat children assumedly from “the environment she raises them in,” if you put a kid with different genetics in there, will they also be fat?

Another way to look at this, actually, is to take kids who are adopted and ask on average, do they resemble their adoptive parents or their biological parents, making the assumption that some go to one environment, others to the other. They, to a very large extent, resembled their biological parents independent of the environment that their adoptive parents provided.

Well, that’s pretty much a measure from all three angles you can measure it, and in every measure, it comes out to be overwhelmingly a matter of genetic predisposition, more than just food intake or exercise.

***

I don’t really want to believe this. It sorta makes me want to cry.

And of course, it goes greatly against what we are all indoctrinated with from our dietary plans of choice.

It is not 100% genetics. It is not a 100% failure of people to keep weight off. It’s just… 70-80% genetics, and 95-98% failure.

Can I be one of the 2%? Can I modify my eating habits, exercise and lifestyle that the 20-30% can balance out the rest? Can I be the freak of nature that actually succeeds?

Damn. I hope so.

Am I delusional? Probably. The alternative might be suicidal, so it’s all I’ve got.

A few more quotes from Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University, and related thoughts.

Friedman took on some of the hysteria regarding the “obesity epidemic.” There’s some stuff I didn’t realize or hadn’t considered.

I actually contacted the epidemiologist named Katherine Flegal, who publishes all the reports that are highlighted in the press every time we hear, in five year intervals, the weight problem has increased dramatically. And I asked her exactly that question. “Well, what about obesity in other countries? Could it be, for example, that the curve in England or Europe has just shifted a little bit to the left?”

Now I asked her the question and she said it might be but no one knows. The data have not been gathered in these other countries in a way that would allow you to compare. So the supposition that this problem is so much worse in the U.S. is not based on actual data.

Regarding the “massive rise in numbers” and “doubling of number of obese” people etc., the foundation of our “obesity epidemic” and related hysteria, he said:

That’s an argument I get all the time because people say, “Well, there’s a huge change in a short period of time in the amount of obesity and that therefore it can’t be genetic.” First of all, actually, that’s wrong. Genes in a population can change very rapidly as environment changes. In fact that’s the whole purpose of having variation in a population. As the environment changes in acute circumstances certain variants are selected and then predominate.

But setting that aside actually, I think people have a misconception about the role of environment in this because of misuse of statistics.

Let me explain what I mean. Obesity is distributed in the population. Some people are thin; some people are heavy; most people are in the middle; and you have a curve, a bell-shaped curve.

Now there’s a known phenomenon in epidemiology that when you have a normally distributed trait, meaning a bell-shaped curve, and a fixed threshold that defines a disease, if that average value shifts even a small amount, you get a disproportionate number of people who exceed the threshold.

So let me give you an analogy for IQ here and then I can tell you the actual data for weight. Imagine that 40 years ago the average IQ was 100 and there was a bell-shaped curve. Imagine now that our educational system improves and the bell-shaped curve shifts a little and the average IQ is now 105. With that you could imagine that the number of people who have an IQ greater than 140, so-called geniuses, might have doubled.

Now is it more useful to think about how our education is doing by saying, “average IQ increased 5 points” or “number of geniuses is doubled?” I think probably both are of interest but the former seems to me more informative.

Ok. So how does that analogize to weight? Over the time period that you’ve heard that the obesity rates have quote “doubled” or gone up by 70 percent, the average weight gain is: 7 to 10 pounds.

What?! All this hysteria over “obesity has DOUBLED!” and actually, it only means that the ‘average’ weight has increased by 7-10 lbs?! But remember that “bell shaped curve”. When you move that entire bell-shape on the graph, the number of people it encompasses is huge, so yeah, mathematically, the number of people affected is sort of exponential.

Do you suppose there’s a reason why we never hear, “Over the last X years, the average weight has increased 7-10lbs”? Instead of, “The number of obese people has DOUBLED!” Realistically, even a ONE pound shift in that gigantic population bell-curve would have moved a helluva lot of people over that line.

Now I’m not here to argue that that’s not important; it is important from a public health point of view. But if we then say that’s what environment contributes to differences in weight over that time frame, think about the fact that 7 to 10 pounds is almost nothing compared to the hundreds of pounds of difference in weight that you might see in any two people walking around the street today, both of whom essentially have unlimited access to calories.

Some of his comments from a couple years ago sounded similar to what I’m hearing about the current book ‘Rethinking Thin’.

…the idea that you can change your weight voluntarily is one that the diet industry has a huge financial interest in. And so anybody can tune into infomercials telling you what you need to do to lose weight is fork over some money to their diet plan, eat it or not eat it and you’ll lose weight. And I don’t think that message and that marketing muscle can be easily counteracted by what scientists have to say about it.

Part of the problem is that that notion fits in with people’s intuition. And this gets very complicated. It’s a control issue; people want to feel like they’re in control of what they eat and what they weigh. But at a certain point you need to ask yourself, “How much am I really in control of it?” Now the problem for feeding is that the time frame with which this drive expresses itself is out weeks to months to actually years. And so by the time the drive exercises its power people don’t recognize it as a drive, and they simply imagine that it’s a loss of will power, not thinking of it as rather an expression of a basic biological drive.

…the available evidence would suggest that the vast majority of people who find themselves at a particular weight — be it thin, medium, or heavy — that’s pretty much their weight.

It’s that somehow people think this is something they ought to be able to control. And they accept all these other things you can’t control that are just who you are. But people are very loathe to believe that what they weigh is who they are.

On one of the early ideas about the Fatzi Regime’s rush to label children based on their weight, he had a few comments as well:

(Ira Flatow: There was a news item that said New York’s Dept. of Education is considering putting kids weight on their report cards. Talk about stigmatizing kids.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Well, you know I would ask everybody, listen to what I have to say and then think about the things you’ll read in the press about obese people and then substitute any other human characteristic in there in place of obesity. You’d never get away with it; you’d get arrested or something. I mean, the things that get said!

I’ll give you a few examples. I was listening to Imus in the political campaign and they were talking about Bill Richardson as a possible vice-presidential candidate and a Newsweek reporter says Bill Richardson is being dismissed as a vice-presidential candidate because he’s too obese. What else could you have said and gotten away with? William Sensenbrenner, a congressman, is quoted in the New York Times as saying to the obese, “Look in the mirror because you’re the one to blame.” I could go on and on. You have an opera singer fired because they’re too obese. And she correctly pointed out that this is the last bastion of stigmatization in the country.

And so when you read these things, think about it. Should they be putting a kid’s weight on the report card? I don’t know. Probably not.

And what about age? Plenty of us know people who ate anything and everything up to a certain point in their life, where they suddenly began gaining weight, which exponentially multiplied. Most people in lowcarb would consider it a gradual development of insulin resistance, based on the standard American diet (and I am referring to the USDA diet, not necessarily to chronic junk food). But might some of it relate to age? Or might those factors overlap? And if some of the “increase in obesity” is correlated with age, how might that affect the statistics? And if it affected the statistics, would that feed into the “obesity epidemic” hysteria?

Now, it’s a fact that people and animals get heavier as they age. We don’t understand why that is. It appears that leptin levels go up and some people lose leptin sensitivity as they age. We have no idea why. I’ll just digress to one other point that gets to your issue about the 7 to 10 lb. average weight gain. When you look at these data, they’re not corrected for age, And so, if the population is aging, that could contribute also to the perception that weight is changing.

He is not only blessedly aware of the flaws of the “BMI” as an evaluation, but of the issue related to weight and fitness. If you can take a person who is obese yet who plays three sports and is otherwise completely healthy–and I’ve known several people (and several teenagers) like this–then clearly obesity and health are not mutually opposing things.

The most important thing is what your general health is. If you’re overweight and not diabetic and not hypertensive and not hypercholesterolemic, then there’s a lot less to think about than if you’re diabetic and hypertensive and hypercholesterolemic. My own opinion, and this is just an opinion, is if you’re overweight and otherwise healthy, I would say try to be fit, try to eat a heart healthy diet and minimize your risk factors and try to enjoy yourself.

If you’re diabetic and have these other problems, then make your best effort to lose weight to the extent that it improves your health, do your best as you would for anything else.

Ira Flatow: So you said, you can be fit and overweight at the same time.

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Right.

I’d never actually thought about the ‘obesity epidemic’ being a sort of overhyped-hysteria. I mean, I think it’s good that this increase is recognized, but let’s get real, none of the authorities are recognizing the primary factors (sugar/carb overdose from an early age, and some researchers think as much as 50% of the population is probably sensitive to wheat/gluten and other primary foods that the official food pyramid insists be the dominant eating) that are massively contributing to weight gain and insulin resistance and eventual diabetes.

So since they are not even looking at the most fundamental cause for change, yet the hype is endless about this problem, what are we looking at here?

***

Years ago I did a study on media, for my own interest, and discovered that the news in general, on TV and in magazines, is not as much informative as predictive. Literally, when you look at it in retrospect, you actually see such a pattern that you start feeling like everything you were “officially told about” was part of some larger plan to “set up” a situation or presentation for something else that was planned ahead of time. Eventually, when I was watching the nightly news and writing down what was being said, I started asking myself, not, ‘Is it true?’ but rather, ‘Why do ‘they’ (whomever ‘they’ is) want me to believe this?’ which turned out to be a far more useful question.

So after seeing Dr. Friedman’s comments, and this from a 2005 lecture no less!, about how the potential age increase in the population (which we know we have thanks to the baby boomer population) can increase the stats, and how the 7-10 lbs average increase on a bell curve would of course make a big change in the numbers, I started thinking, “Since they don’t really want to look at the most legit science for solving it, and since the official recommendations are still corrupted by corporatism, then why is that they want us all to share the hysteria about this change in numbers?”

I think there are probably
– (a) profitable drugs which will get approved sooner than they should because of this hysteria, and that’s being relied on;
– (b) legislations which will get passed that would never ever fly otherwise, but will get pushed through thanks to this hysteria, and that’s being relied on;
– and surely some things I haven’t thought of yet.

It’s not really paranoia or conspiracy thinking, it’s just “precedent” from having observed news and related trends in the past and seen how it plays out in other subjects. I can’t help but wonder if the ‘hysteria’ is being ‘encouraged’ behind the scenes because of the “power” it provides.

Remember the recent British report, which had US doctors involved as well, that first suggested radical “intervention” into the lives of children and families including taking kids from parents and even forcing gastric bypass surgery, they actually said OUTRIGHT that they didn’t have the evidence to back their recommendations being what was right, but that the urgency of the situation demanded action. In other words: thanks to the hysteria, we no longer even have to prove something is a good idea before we radically invade the rights of the populace.

Maybe a little less hysteria and a few more people like Dr. Friedman would be useful. Not only for education and research, but for the actual political rights of individuals, children and families.

Most folks who have been on a lowcarb eating plan for awhile already understand that individual metabolism is, well, individual and not really predictable. But I think a lot of people wouldn’t argue that a predisposition to being lean or overweight might have a genetic basis.

Think a minute about what we mean by genetic. Does that mean that some races of people might be “more” genetically prone to obesity based on the current eating habits of our world, than others?

Yes, that’s what it means.

Now think about the rampant and unabashed prejudice levied against obese people culture-wide.

Let us say, just as a hypothesis, that native Americans, known to be genetically susceptible to alcoholism more than most other races, were also genetically susceptible to obesity.

So if we choose to discriminate against obesity, as a culture in a myriad of ways, what we are really doing is “cloaking” racial prejudice in our obesity prejudice, because a disproportionate number of folks from certain races will suffer compared to others.

Sure, people might (maybe) be as prejudiced against white folks who are obese, but the reality is that if someone is arbitrarily deciding whether a person is too fat to adopt or if a child is too fat to be allowed to live with their family or too fat to deserve a job, there is a whole lot of “soft” room for discrimination in there, since obesity is a nice blanket over the top of it.

When Western governments are talking about “intervention” that dramatically invades the privacy and rights of individuals and families, this becomes a radical and racial issue.

Here are some selected quotes from Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University.

Ira Flatow: You said that we don’t have enough data to understand why there’s been a 7 to 10 pound. weight increase. Do you have a hypothesis of your own about why this might be?

Jeffrey Friedman: What I think is happening is this. It turns out that that weight increase isn’t uniform across the population, and there’s actually really good epidemiologic evidence to suggest that. I think that a lot of the weight gain is concentrated in specific ethnic groups.

…I think that what we’re seeing now is ethnic groups that are predisposed to obesity are now getting access to unlimited calories. And I think that has a lot to do with that weight increase. And there’s some evidence to support that but it’s not definitive. Actually a lot of the epidemiologic data that you would really want to understand things like this is lacking.

…it turns out actually that these really obese kids are concentrated in particular ethnic groups and the gene pools are different in different ethnic groups.

So eventually we’ll be able to say something like, if you’re Native American, your chances of being biased against even by government agencies, is ___% higher than if you were say, Romanian.

If there is a higher chance that someone native were obese than there is that someone Romanian would be obese, then if we pretend a child or parent’s obesity is mostly about environment (hence they should receive family “intervention” by the government), we are saying that natives inherently less-deserve to raise their own kids, because more of them are fat than some other racial groups. (Remember this is hypothetical.)

So, if you’re white enough (or whatever) to luck into thinner genes, you’re probably ok, but we’ll have to round up more of the kids from those darn (check one susceptible-to-obesity race)’s kids, ’cause they are just too damn fat so much more often.

Do the cultural leaders of the races most genetically predisposed to obesity realize this? Realize that not taking any issue with “obesity issues,” means building-in institutionalized bias against their people?

Do you ever notice that everybody has an opinion about how people get fat, and how people should lose fat? Always.

Over the last 17-18 years since I got fat, I’ve had the opportunity to experience quite an “up-close and personal sociological evaluation of how people react to other people who are fat.” This would probably be a more pleasant study if I were not the fat person in question, of course, but it’s no less interesting, despite that.

Most of us have experienced at least some of this. You may be sitting in a restaurant with several acquaintances. One of them, usually someone pointedly overweight themselves, but who is clearly delighted to observe that you are more overweight than they are, will suddenly become the Grand Vizier of Dietary Advice. (The probability of this happening is in direct proportion to their guilt about what they themselves are eating.)

They may assure you, some sincerely and some patronizingly, that you definitely should eat the junk they are eating because the entire secret of weight loss is just “portion control” and “moderation.” The implied translation, of course, is: If you didn’t eat like an uncontrollable pig all the time, you wouldn’t be fat. They don’t really mean that consciously, most would never say such a thing, but the theory underlies their advice: obviously, you’re fat, so if you “ate moderately” they assume you would not be… you see where that goes.

They will assure you that if a person just gets adequate exercise, these things take care of themselves. Of course, the fact that your metabolism might require a triathalon to compensate for the dinner they want you to eat so they’ll feel better about doing so themselves, escapes them. They assume that the fellow on the left who is thin and wiry despite eating enough for three people, has the identical metabolism as yourself, who is clearly fat despite eating less than everyone there.

Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University (and the researcher who discovered the hormone leptin, which plays a crucial role it appears in how our body regulates our weight), said about obesity:

I think in contrast to almost every other medical condition where the lay public would just leave it to the scientist to inform them about what causes it, what the nature of the problem is, and what we should do about it, obesity is a condition where absolutely everyone has an opinion. Everybody has a deeply held set of personal beliefs about what causes the problem.

Well, I think fat is like the baffling tax code (and resultant nightmares about scary amounts of money you owe).

Plenty of people are lucky just to balance their checkbooks properly. The convoluted complexity of human metabolism is more than even the experts have a grip on at the moment, let alone the laymen. And it certainly doesn’t fit into the sound-bite over-simplied spoon-fed media our culture has become as addicted to as we have to carbohydrates.

Humans love to feel like they know what they’re doing, and what the answers are to things. We like it when everything has a place and just WORKS. No ambiguity, no confusion, no complexity. Nothing subjective. Only WE are allowed to be subjective: the rest of the world is not. When we are subjective, it is our right, our feelings, and who we are. When anything or anyone else is subjective, if we disagree, it is probably that they are irrational. Of course. If they were sensible, they’d agree with us! :-)

We are bred from childhood to fear fat. Fat is bad. Fat is the Other. Fat brings mocking, derision, abuse, social shunning, and pity. This is culturally bred into all of us and isn’t even conscious in most cases. So when the question of fat comes up, the last thing anybody wants, is to feel it’s an impossibly confusing morass of unfinished science and unanswered questions; we have no real handle on it. Survival instinct alone makes us want, makes us need, to feel like we have the formula and answer to fat, so we have power over it. The fact that we don’t know is irrelevent. If we feel we know, I think our subconscious fear-based psychology feels better about the whole thing.

The persistent denial of an entire culture in regards to obesity, coupled with a nearly hysterical panic about it, only emphasizes this. Research studies have had some interesting findings on this sociological subject. Some people say they’d rather be seriously injured than fat. Some college kids say they’d date a wife-beater or drug-user before they’d date someone noticeably overweight.

As a culture, our attempt to ’stamp out fat’ has been even less successful than our alleged war on drugs. We supply endless quantities of alcohol, and caffeine. The ghastly long-term abuse of cocaine-level drugs such as the entire class of drugs similar to Ritalin (and worse), for children as young as 2 years old, is mind blowing. (Every ’school shooter’ in the news, was a kid officially drugged by parent/government/school for years, did you know that?)

Yet despite how easy it is to give someone enough legal drugs to have them wipe out families of four on the highway, efforts continue to outlaw vitamins and herbs without prescription for being “dangerous”, and if a high school girl shares Midol for monthly cramps with a friend and is seen she can be suspended. We’re completely schizophrenic about the drug issue in our culture. It is a WAR on drugs. A war in which the profiteers appear to be profiting (the war on drugs helps fund the covert military operations congress will not approve or the public cannot know about), and the problem continues to get worse instead of better. With that kind of ‘help’, we could be at least ten times worse off within years.

And so it is with obesity. Magazines neatly couple drool-able foods with the latest diet fad and both on the front page. “Healthy recipes” in them tend to be blood sugar grenades allegedly made ‘healthy’ by using low-fat margarine and whole-grain flour… rather than a recipe that was more healthy by being, well, less UNhealthy. We constantly model near-impossibly skinny women as ‘the ideal’. We have endless ways of enforcing both subtly and overtly the ’sin’ of someone being fat and daring to show up in public, and then we wonder why people especially young women develop anorexia, binging, bulemia, and other eating disorders. If our ‘war on obese people obesity’ is as successful as our war on drugs has been, we can expect to have a far worse problem 5 and especially 10 years from now. The only real difference is that the diet industry is not funding black ops. We assume.

As Dr. Friedman said, everybody has an opinion. I agree. I have never met a person who openly said something like, “I have no idea how someone would get or stay thin.” Everybody, but everybody, believes they know the way, and this includes nearly every obese person I ever met, every person who never had to diet in their life, and so on.

Many years ago, a research paper published in the parapsychology (psychic research) field reviewed the perceptions and opinions of scientists outside the field about the subject. (For those who don’t know, many of the leading parapsychologists are/were legit reputable physicists and engineers and other hard scientists, before they dared touch the subject, which is the kiss of death to any science career: we are not allowed to ask those questions.) Pretty much all the scientists had an opinion about it (hint: it was definitely not a good one). Pretty much all the scientists believed that their opinion held scientific merit because they were a scientist, and they believed that they had enough information to have a right to opinion.

But when interviewed, it turned out that pretty much all of them were completely ignorant of the real science in the field, and their entire edifice of opinion was based on media: movies, magazines, comic books and fiction, and hokey commercial advertising. None of them knew anything about the real science, nor had they ever looked, nor did they want to know–but that did not keep them from pushing their ‘expert opinion’ on others with almost no provocation at all.

It is like being raised to dislike people who are a certain race or religion: You cannot reason with a belief that is not based on reason. We are bred to some prejudices, and they are constantly enforced culture-wide. Fat is one of them.

More from Dr. Friedman in the next few posts.

I’d like to relate to you a situation that examples just one of many ways that discrimination based on body weight has reached ludicrous ‘official’ proportions. I might add that the UK, USA and Australia share so much legislation and culture that I consider anything taken seriously in one as a potential in the other, and all have a myriad of issues with this subject.

Kylie Lannigan of Victoria, Australia, has PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. It can occur in girls as young as 11, and is the most common reason for women who are unable to conceive children. The list of side effects are a real bummer for the people who have it; not counting infertility, hirsutism (hair growth in annoying places), acne and other issues, one of the most common reasons we see people with this in the lowcarb world is because it tends to induce weight gain or actual obesity, usually in the torso area (the “apple” shaped figure). It can put them at “greater risk of” high blood pressure or high cholesterol or Type II Diabetes, but then, so can a zillion other factors, and the weight alone could do that, with or without PCOS.

In case you think this is rare, it is astoundingly common: About 1 in 10 women of childbearing age, is the current estimate of PCOS prevalance.

The Lannigans had fertility treatments, but alas the only result of that is, seven years ago Kylie tragically miscarried a baby girl at 22 weeks. Further attempts at IVF (in-vitro fertilization) were not successful.

Not surprisingly, couples with a PCOS woman are likely to consider adopting children, and three years ago, the Lannigans, desperate for a child, finally sought that route to parenthood.

It seemed hopeful. They owned a home, had been married for ten years, and were both employed full time: Kylie is a chef, while her husband supervises a vineyard. They wanted to begin the adoption process while she was still young enough to be considered a good candidate.

Kylie weighs 278 lbs and is about 5 foot 7 inches tall, but although technically obese, Kylie walks to work and night school every day, she had testing for heart disease and diabetes and was cleared as free of both, and so aside from the inconvenience it may give her, her body weight is not a worthy issue to adoption, nor did the people they interviewed with seem concerned about it.

The initial documentation and interviews mentioned that serious health reasons could potentially disqualify an applying adoptive parent, but although PCOS is a bummer (to understate it) for the people who have it, it’s not like it means you’re going to Keel Over Any Minute Now(tm). PCOS is not considered a disqualifying health issue.

If they did bias against that, they’d not only be disqualifying 1 in 10 women, but singling out the vast majority of the women most likely to want to adopt a child!

Three years later…

THREE YEARS the Lannigans have spent in the tedious, stressful, delaying bureaucracy of the application process. Kylie is 29 now, and nearing the age when she is no longer considered ideal for adopting an infant child. She and her husband went to seminars, had medical, police and finance checks and a home assessment, everything requested, everything that would give them a chance to make it happen, for years.

Finally, after all that, the Department of Human Services adoption counselors came out for yet another interview, and told them what wonderful parents they would be.

Except, they added, Kylie is too fat to be considered qualified to parent.

They told her she would need to lose 114 lbs to qualify for a BMI rating that would make them acceptable to adopt.

She has lost 26 lbs so far. But as she mentioned in an interview, she doesn’t even have time to lose another 88 lbs to qualify for their demands. She’ll be considered too old to be ideal to adopt an infant (over 30) by then, and that’s even if everything went perfectly, despite her body’s strong tendency to obesity, and even if, like some improbable Disney-movie ending, all the weight just fell off.

The agency, rather than ‘rejecting’ their application, ’suspended’ it with an “unless” caveat: so severe a weight loss, with such a time limit based on standard policies, that they may as well have rejected it. In fact, all ’suspending’ with that kind of requirement really does is reject it but without their having to defend in court what right they had to do that.

Kylie’s weight was no secret three years ago when they began this process, but nobody thought to mention to her that “fat” on its own would disqualify her. Do you think a government agency would openly advertise, “Don’t apply to adopt a child unless you are thin?” Maybe they should. It would have saved years of time and a lot of money and emotional investment on the Lannigans’s part.

Thought to consider: With the US and UK medical experts recommending “intervention” including seizure of children from parents if the children are obese, this brings up an interesting alternative: If people are too fat to be good parents at her weight, and this is official enough for a government-based agency to rule on, at what weight will social services eventually decide to seize children from perfectly good parents for the parents’ crime of being ‘too fat’?

The first and most obvious issue is the sheer prejudice. If they had applied this prejudice based on any other factor, they’d be sued like crazy. They can’t say, “Well you’re Race X,” or “Well you’re gay,” but they can say, “Well you’re fat.”

The obesity is nothing more than an ‘increased risk factor’ — but there are many, many ‘genetic markers’ which qualify as risk factors and have nothing to do with body size; discrimination of any one of which would be arbitrary and biased.

The second issue is the breach of faith. This woman has a time limit because of her age and adoption policy. She has worked for three years doing everything they asked of her so she could qualify to adopt a child that needed a home. And not until the moment they were supposed to clear her for it, finally, do they mention, “Oh yeah, and you have to lose over 100 lbs.”

As if this couldn’t have come up three years ago, so she would have had this time to work toward that! (Not that it’s any guarantee it’d work.) This point alone has several problems:

The first problem is the arbitrary application of their prejudice against her weight until the last minute.

The second problem is that the demand is so big that she’ll likely age-out of the application process before she CAN do it, short of some horrible, health-destroying attempt to fill that spot in her soul that desperately wants a child. (I can just see some desperate infertile woman becoming a cocaine addict to lose enough weight fast enough to qualify for the child. Yeah, that’ll help…)

The third problem is the frankly ludicrous and injust assumption that she, and by proxy anybody, can simply lose that weight. “Eat less and exercise more!,” the religious mantra of Fatzism goes. The fact that some people do NOT lose weight despite that, especially with a condition that probably caused the gain in the first place, or that it may take incredibly long periods of time to do so, and that different bodies are simply, well, different, is completely ignored.

How come the diet industry’s making well over 50 BILLION dollars a year, if all people have to do is eat healthy and/or eat less and exercise more?

And as one commenter noted, what if she regained the weight?
What, would they repossess the child??

Thanks to BigFatBlog for alerting me to this.

I realized something last night. I’ve been reading a lot during the late-night hours over the last week or two, and it actually took a little while before my subconscious put a major “contradiction” together in the back of my brain and sent up a flare.

obesity /obes·i·ty
Pronunciation: ō-bē′si-tē

Psychology Today online: Obesity is a condition of having excess body weight. When an adult is more than 100 pounds overweight, they are considered morbidly obese.

The Free Dictionary: [Obesity is an] increase in body weight beyond the limitation of skeletal and physical requirements, as the result of excessive accumulation of body fat. Morbid obesity: the condition of weighing two or more times the ideal weight; so called because it is associated with many serious and life-threatening disorders.

MedicineNet.com: Obesity: Well above ones normal weight. A person has traditionally been considered to be obese if they are more than 20 percent over their ideal weight. Obesity has been more precisely defined by the National Institutes of Health (the NIH) as a BMI of 30 and above. (A BMI of 30 is about 30 pounds overweight.)

OK, now we know what it “means.” Of course this says nothing about cause.

But wait, here to the rescue, in the American Journal of Psychiatry, with recommendations for the coming DSM-V manual (that’s the official manual of medical-psychiatry):

Issues for DSM-V: Should Obesity Be Included as a Brain Disorder?
by Nora D. Volkow, M.D. and Charles P. O’Brien, M.D., PH.D.

Their recommendation includes the following fascinating assertion:

Obesity is characterized by compulsive consumption of food and the inability to restrain from eating despite the desire to do so.

So, you’re telling me that of the MYRIAD of biochemical and metabolic reasons people gain weight or do not lose it, they have narrowed it down to the fact that fat people are just “gluttons who can’t control themselves”?!

Hey, I bet getting people of size accepted is going to be easier when the official psychiatric (that’s medical) field has obesity classified as a BRAIN DISORDER.

Now, I can easily see classifying binge-eating, or “compulsive eating”, just like anorexia and bulemia (the latter of which is just binge-eating + self-induced purging), as a psyche condition.

I just don’t see how they can “smoothly slide” this ASSUMPTION of the CAUSE of “obesity” into the official records like it’s a fact. Like there is no other cause or anything else to consider.

Once this is THAT official, we no longer have a medical system that ‘assumes’ that, we have a medical system that thinks it ‘knows’ that.

I assume you realize that once obesity is a brain disorder, any doctor on behalf of government-medicine or insurance-medicine can “require” you take psychiatric drugs to deal with your mental problem before anything else.

Fabulous.

Children Fat People are the new Jews.

Fat fu has a couple great posts, “The Children’s Crusade” and “More Evidence” that anybody interested in weight issues or human issues ought to read.

The Children’s Crusade

More Evidence

Have you ever heard about the theory (and book) about “Six Degrees of Separation”? Wikipedia’s entry on this says in part:

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one “step” away from each person he or she knows and two “steps” away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth. [...] While the exact number of links between people differs depending on the population measured, it is generally found to be relatively small. Hence, six degrees of separation is somewhat synonymous with the idea of the “small world” phenomenon.

I’ve been feeling a bit like that lately.

6 Degrees: Everything Eventually Relates to My Fat

I started reading stuff and it just kept leading to new topics that related to my own interests, life, health, etc. in ways I hadn’t thought of before. It started with Fat Acceptance, so that is this post. I’ll cover other topics later.

I’m just sharing, by blogging, stuff that is running through my head. I don’t really have a major politic though I may have an opinion.

Warning: not for the faint of heart. I’m pretty opinionated on social-politics! Especially when it relates to obesity.

“Fat Acceptance”

There is a lot of stuff in the ‘Fat Acceptance’ movement that I honestly never thought about before. I am writing this post in part to try and articulate inside myself what I’ve been thinking, and in part to expose other people to the subject–or my perspective of it, anyway.

The FA movement has its own problems. Like feminism, it was ’stolen’ by better funded, more vocal, drastically less effective and more-harm-than-help sorts, but there are still people and groups with a closer-to-original concept.

Pretend for a moment that you are a woman (if you are not). Let us say that you found a website by a man who said he totally respected women and considered them equals and worked for women’s equality right along with others who claim that.

But all his blog posts were things like, “Don’t be a Sissy: ditch the stupid flowered dresses,” or “Why women shouldn’t be allowed to do any job that requires body-strength or weapons,” or “Why Men Don’t Like Fat Chicks,” or whatever.

You would think, “This jerk doesn’t respect women, and he doesn’t consider them equals, or at least (in the case of the job) able to be competent. Rather, he is simply willing to say, ‘To the degree that women act like I think they should, and to the degree that I find them physically acceptable to my completely subjective opinion, then they are ok. Outside that box, women suck.’”

And you’d be right. That guy would NOT be any benefit at all to women; he’d be the worst imaginable “friend” that any kind of women’s acceptance group could imagine.

Or:

Pretend for a moment that you are a woman (if you are not). Let us say you found a website by a woman who said she was all for women’s rights and so on, and worked actively toward this promotion just like many other women do.

And then you found blog posts with titles like “Why Choosing to be a Nun is A Waste of Your Body”, or “Why Rape is Usually the Woman’s Fault,” or “Why Having Kids Instead of a Good Job is a Dead End”, or whatever.

You would think, “This jerk doesn’t respect women, and she is not interested in women’s rights. Rather, she is simply willing to say, ‘To the degree that women are choosing to act less like women, then I will conditionally support a woman’s right to exist.’”

And you’d be right. That gal would NOT be any benefit at all to women; she’d be the worst imaginable “friend” that any kind of women’s rights group could imagine.

All People Are Equal (but thin people are more equal than others)

Well, the ‘Fat Acceptance’ movement faces that, with others “claiming” to be part of it and being almost the opposite.

Ironically, the biggest problems come from seemingly positive things: all things “diet” and “fitness.”

Diets by their very nature are anti-fat. If ya thought it was ok if someone was fat, why would ya recommend they diet?

Fitness isn’t anti-fat, but if it implies that not being able to run five miles is a “problem”, then it probably is. The problem is not the action, of course. The problem is the attitude that it rides in on.

These ideas, websites, blogs etc. are not problems merely because they exist; they’re as welcome to exist as labradors and french fries and people who think navel piercing is cool. But usually their existence, and their philosophy, nearly always comes stapled to the rejection-slip of “should”.

You SHOULD diet, you SHOULD be thin, you SHOULD exercise more, “should”… which is just another way for saying, You aren’t good enough, and your choices aren’t really yours to make; if you don’t make the choices we think are right, you’re unacceptable.

I lost weight. Yay me! Now I’m 100 lbs less evil more acceptable closer to counting lighter!

Now if someone like me who has lost weight mentions it, the same way we would mention rain, or having learned to Tango, that’s no big deal. But if every time I see a fat person I want to go ’save them’ by telling them how lowcarb is the answer, or whatever, then I’d be practicing the same discrimination. If every fat person I talked to about where to find cute fat-size clothes, instantly brought up diet options, that’d be the same bias.

Because it is the assumption that fat is bad, and the assumption that everybody and anybody CAN lose tons of weight, the assumption that anybody SHOULD, the assumption that unlike every other issue in life people don’t have the right to choose what they do or how they are, that is at issue.

Now apply the examples above to fat and you understand why the FA people are sensitive about diet/fitness efforts seeming just as biased as outright I-hate-fat-people efforts.

Pretend for a moment that you are fat (if you are not). Let us say that you find websites, books and blogs, by people who claim to truly accept people as they are and to want to empower all people to make their life whatever they want.

But they are surrounded by articles like, “Fat Should Be Fit: Training for Marathons,” also known as, “Well being fat is somewhat ok IF you are “fit” by my standards but otherwise is totally unacceptable.”

Or, “The 10 Best Diets,” also known as, “Being fat is SO not ok we expect you to be changing that immediately!”

Or, “Fat: Large Size (14-20) Fashion” also known as, “Well there is a LIMIT to what is acceptable; 30 lbs maybe, but not 200 extra lbs!”

In a nutshell it comes down to, “Fat is only conditionally ok, depending on whether you fit my personal criteria of acceptable.”

Which is really just saying it ain’t ok, period.

“I liked ya till I saw yer cellulite!”

As long as it’s not ok for someone to weigh 300 pounds and still be treated like a human being, even if they are NOT dieting nor interested in it, even if they are wearing bright yellow sexy clothes that make some people aghast, even if they are NOT “fit” by whomever’s standards, then it is never going to be truly ok for people to be who they are at other weights.

If it’s not ok to be 300 lbs overweight, then it’s really not ok to be 30 lbs overweight either; as long as the criteria is arbitrary and subjective, it is going to be exclusionary to someone. Every socially accepted bias based on weight sets a precedent for why someone has the right to judge someone else. Or in short: it institutionalizes outright prejudice.

True equality and acceptance is not measured by whether you are considered attractive by someone’s arbitrary personal standard. No man (or woman) should have to want to have sex with someone in order for them to be considered an equal human.

I’m guilty.

I hate this, but it’s true: I have biases myself. I don’t judge people who are huge, but you know what? When I see someone who is 40 lbs overweight, walking past looking just fine except this huge belly-fat hanging over their way-too-tight hip-hugger pants, I think to myself, “WTF are they doing wearing that? What, they can’t afford clothes that fit? They actually think that looks good? Geez, that’s like white-trash fashion.”

That’s a prejudice, and it’s wrong. It’s none of my damn business what other people wear. And hell, some people probably DO think it looks good. These people didn’t ask for and don’t need my permission to be what they are and wear what they want. What gall! Am I saying they should wear baggies and dark colors because they’re overweight? Maybe I am subtly implying that — my own prejudice against myself, and my fat, and by proxy all fat.

And I think it’s bad to lock women in veils? What is the assumption that fat women should dress conservatively, other than veil-psychology applied in a western way to a select group of people?

I want to be a better person, and I don’t want to be like that, and now that I’ve been made conscious of it, I’m going to work on improving myself.

In our world today, you can parade through Jewish neighborhoods with Swastika signs because it’s your right to opinion, or parade about with communist and fascist and terrorist sympathy signs, and nobody is expected to complain lest it infringe on your ‘rights’.

You can build golf clubs and exclude women because it’s your right to preference, and nobody is expected to complain lest it infringe on your ‘rights’ (to ensure all major business deals and positions of power are men-only, and white-men-only generally as well).

Be All That You Can Be Others Think You Should Be

But you cannot be fat: that’s not really ok. Well sure, you can BE fat, you can be happy about it, but you’re likely to suffer more abuse than a Rastafarian mom in a Skinhead school PTA meeting.

You can jog to the sound of moooo’s from guys driving by who want to remind you how you’re a cow (my favorite experience when I first gained a lot of weight and went walking one evening). You can be more excluded from church, PTA and other social gatherings than as if you were the 4-eyed-fatso in 4th grade at age 9. You can have trash or food thrown at you in angry outbursts from people driving by who can’t abide having suffered the trauma of looking at you: it’s ok for them to treat fat people almost like skinheads treat gays or blacks, because hey, you’re FAT!–and everyone knows that is just NOT OK.

You can be denied jobs, promotions, transfers, raises, and all kinds of other things, for what “a bad example” you set.

But here’s the real crux of it: the only thing worse than being fat, is if you dare actually CHOOSE to ACCEPT being fat. Don’tcha know it’s only almost-ok to be fat if you are desperately trying not to be?!

So I guess, if you admit you totally suck as you are, then you’ll be almost-accepted in good faith that eventually you’ll be more like others and that’ll make you ok.

There is merely a margin of potential-acceptance-maybe-IF. Rather like snotty seniors in an exclusive fraternity who patronize the desperate freshmen that want in; good boy, pat on the head, keep trying, maybe eventually you’ll be acceptable.

Your reasons for not dieting are irrelevant. The world figures if you didn’t eat 412 bonbons a day you wouldn’t be so damn fat, and if you’d just QUIT THAT the problem would easily and instantly resolve!

As if the diet industry would be making tens of billions annually if that was really all there was to it. My god. What lack of critical thinking must be present in our population to actually believe this?

Pounds for Points!

It comes from within the ranks of the fat, too.

Dieters cheer each other on despite that historically and on the overall, diets and weight loss surgery have probably done more destruction to human life than the Inquisition ever did. I swear, we cheer each other like those people in the ritual circle on Logan’s Run, hoping to Go-To-God at age 30 in a blazing flash of laser light.

On the fantastic youtube “Fat Rant” of Joy Nash (a must-watch!), she points out:

The International Journal of Obesity says that 95 to 98 percent of dieters who lose 75 pounds or more, gain back every single pound within three years. Two-thirds of them do it within that first year. Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent is ALL OF THEM. Success is practically a freak occurrence!

Seriously, watch this little video, she is beautiful and positive and right:

Now, as someone working on losing weight, and as someone with examples of people who have succeeded in losing a lot of it, and gaining muscle, and keeping the weight off, and having their life vastly improved — I HATE THOSE STATISTICS.

I want them to be untrue. Or, like everybody, “I want MY eating plan to be the exception!”

Sure, there’s lots of food religions, but only lowcarbers go to skinny heaven. Haha.

(I know, yeah, yeah. “It isn’t a diet, it’s an eating plan.” Yeah. Until you go off it, then it was a diet retroactively wasn’t it? Rather like you can quit smoking for 2 years, but if you restart you never quit, you just ‘paused’.)

Some of it almost made my brain hurt. I’m facing the dichotomy of WANTING to be truly non-prejudiced, wanting DESPERATELY for fat-acceptance to happen, yet having biases myself.

I spent days thinking about all the stuff I read on these blogs.

I am pointedly dieting, so I guess if I really thought being fat was ok I probably wouldn’t be. For now, I’m willing to sacrifice those logic brownie points for the slim chance of being in the 2-5% who succeed, and living longer for my little girl.

But plenty of people ‘have been there, done that’ with diets, way more than me. Why should they have to diet and get fatter, as most do? Why should they have to do anything others think they “should”?

My cousin should quit living on pizza and beer too, but nobody’s in HIS face about it, since he’s skinny. The issue shouldn’t be poundage, it should be the right of a human being to make their own decisions and to be whatever they truly are without hiding, apologizing, caveating, etc.

Weight-Loss Evangelism

Is highly public dieting (like this blog) anti-fat-acceptance? Well, some feel it is, even if unintentional or indirectly.

NOT because one chooses to diet — that’s a personal choice I have the right to make. But, if there is ANY assumption that any other people, no matter what size or weight, “should” diet, then maybe (maybe) the fat dieter is just as big a problem for the social-cause of fat people being treated like human beings, as fat-hating sorts are.

In both cases, it is implying (or outright saying) that “It is not ok to be fat, and anybody who is, should be doing everything in their power to FIX that.”

Or: “Sure, it’s perfectly fine to be fat, but oh my god I’m trying so hard not to be you know?!” Er…. yeah. Perfectly fine by me, riiiight.

OK, let’s not even pretend that I can truly say I consider fat just fine at the same moment I’m desperately trying to dig myself out of it.

But… fat is a fat person’s problem. It is not the business or problem of the people looking on. Nobody was ever injured by observing someone who was fat, any more than they are injured by observing someone who is short, or blonde, or black, or catholic. People just are what they are.

A common FA issue is people claiming to believe in fat rights, but then attaching “conditional” acceptance: I will accept this human being, Jane, as an equal with a right to her own decisions, only if she falls within parameters I am willing to accept.

• Sorta fat: ok. Huge: not ok.
• Fat but can go jogging: ok. Fat and not fit: not ok.
• Fat but beautiful anyway: ok. Fat and I don’t like him/her: not ok.
• Fat but trying not to be: ok. Fat and cool with it: not ok!

How could any of this be construed as truly accepting a human being for what they are? Conditional acceptance is not acceptance at all.

It’s not ok to be black only if you’re working sincerely on becoming whiter, for example. If that’s the criteria, then clearly, it’s just not ok at all.

(Although the bizarre lightening of skin in the case of black celebrities (and let’s not even start on Michael Jackson!) almost seems to dispute this.)

Barbie Comes In Colors

The awesomely talented artists winning awards today, like Halle Berry and Tyra Banks and Denzel Washington, though they are (at the least, if not moreso) as talented as others in their position, one has to admit that their facial features are a lot closer to most the white folks I know than the black folks. (Actually, Africa has every imaginable feature set. But for the blacks inside the USA, it does seem the aqualine features are less common.)

So in reality our society already has an example of “conditional” acceptance: it’s ok to be black if you sorta look like a sensual white with a deeply tropical tan. Oprah wouldn’t be on the cover of many magazines at my Wal-Mart aisle if she didn’t own the magazine (and some percentage of North America) AND have the highest public recognition factor in the country. She wouldn’t be on the covers–because she’s black? No. Because she doesn’t look like a skinny white chick who had a color filter applied. Her features are not really inside the comfort borders of the Hollywood mold, except by the proxy of her money and success.

Politically almost nobody is “prejudiced” anymore. Sounds good on paper doesn’t it? But the reality is that there is a “conditional acceptance” on a good deal of racial acceptance too, and you’ve only got to look around to see it. You see it in some women’s issues as well, some differently-abled issues, some gay/lesbian issues, pretty much any group of people that faces bias, gets the alleged-friends Of The Movement that will say, “I’m on your side! I totally accept your people — if you do this, and that, and with this condition, and that caveat, and…”

“I’m On YOUR Side”

Out of an entire culture that literally despises, mocks, is disgusted by, is rejective of, fat people (the more fat, the moreso), there is a fairly small contingent of people who will say, “I’m not prejudiced.”

But when those same people can’t seem to get over trying to foist diets off on fat people, when they argue ‘for’ fat-acceptance ‘only’ under arbitrary conditions, then they’re just pulling that same just-get-whiter logic.

Here’s a typical issue: “it’s ok if you’re fat but only if you keep it very quiet”: not more than 50 lbs overweight; wear dark colors; and god almighty, please don’t wear a bathing suit, as your getting sun or exercise would do actual injury to people near you forced to look on, just like white women having to share a restroom with black women 60 years ago was considered an unacceptable trauma to white folk.

(My god, is it that recent?! If life on earth is the scope, we’ve been about 3.2% civilized for about .00000007 seconds at this point. Nowhere to go but up I guess.)

OK, so we go and congratulate people for losing weight. I’ve lost 100 lbs, though that varies about 10 lbs either way lately, a whole lot more if you count my previous lowcarb phases. I’m working on it, and people are very supportive, and that rocks. But the Fat Acceptance people would say: Is the congratulations because you are less fat than you were yesterday? If it is merely “I have a goal, and a challenge, and this is my accomplishment,” then that is awesome. That is what it should be. If it is instead, “That’s great that you are 100 lbs less-fat than you used to be!” then technically, that’s a bias. Because there shouldn’t really be the assumption that a person “must or should” be thin, that fat on its own is ‘bad’.

Fat just IS what it IS. For most people it’s unhealthy, but for most people, survey says it may be healthier than their chronic failing diet attempts.

Do I feel the right to intrude on my neighbor’s drinking with this logic? No. Then why do I automatically feel a sense of near PANIC at the idea of a fat person simply deciding they were fat, that’s the way they are, and too freakin bad if others don’t like it? Cultural programming??

And this is part of the bias I fought, reading this stuff.

My mind keeps going, “No, no! They must be thinner because it’s miserable and unhealthy to be fat!”

Gaaaaaah.

The self-appointed Gods of Thin

Now in today’s world, we have the ultimate do-gooder invasion of rights and invalidation of others: the “for your own good” theory. Also known as, “But I’m just so concerned for your health!”

“My” should be the key word there. My parents and child and others who love me can use that line. Not strangers.

Research and reality are making clear that most people who diet end up simply doing more harm to their weight and health by the act of dieting itself. So that’s quite a damning situation, if you “must” diet. Kinda like being thrown in the lake with rocks around your ankles and if you drown you were innocent, but if you float they burn you at the stake as a witch instead! For the vast majority of the population, it’s a lose-lose medical situation.

My friend chooses to smoke cigarettes. We’ve now banned smoking from a good portion of the USA, but we haven’t yet gone so far as to actually invade their privacy, kidnap their children, force drugs or surgery on them, or other attack-methods for bringing them into the “popular considered-norm” with the excuse, “It’s just because we are all SO CONCERNED FOR YOU!”

BAH!

Since the dawn of time human nature has seen control-issues and governing forces trying to forcefully pound other humans into whatever shape they feel is most like themselves. “It’s for the children,” or, “It’s for their own good/health,” is in fact one of the brilliant reasonings used in every tyranny throughout history — Nazi propaganda often had exactly this kind of ‘excuse’ for why anything was ok. More utter disasters and hideous cruelty and destruction of basic human rights have been perpetuated in the name of “for their own good” than pretty much any other excuse.

I have a friend who chooses to not take his medications. That’s dangerous to him. Another friend chooses to live in bad neighborhoods that already nearly got him killed. Another friend chooses to engage in sports that could leave him paralyzed or dead. I have friends and family who are skinny (not just lean, I mean SKINNY–they cannot gain weight even when they try), who live dominantly on whiskey. Or live on McDonalds and Dr. Pepper, as do their children, who like them are skinny, so their likely health issues are completely invisible until they’ll come down with something shortly after adulthood–IF it waits that long. These people are either seriously “risking” themselves or quite literally killing themselves gradually, every single day.

But for the most part, nobody gives a flying pig about how unhealthy they are, except in academic meetings about medical statistics. It’s ok if they are unhealthy, it’s ok if they are even self-destructive – as long as they aren’t fat.

‘Cause you know, if you are fat, any issues — real or assumed — about your health and your “fitness” become the whole world’s business to pass judgement on.

Does this Bikini come in 6x?

Maybe Jane and John don’t choose to diet — not even with lowcarb. Maybe Jane thinks she looks great in that size 4x halter top and shorts. Who sets the god-like standards for these things?

Where on the “spectrum” between my cousin, who is literally dying of lack of bodyfat, hospitalized more than once, eating everything she can and unable to gain — vs me, needing to lose another 200 lbs, clearly suffering movement problems stemming from the weight, often eating almost nothing and when I do, it’s low calorie and lowcarb, yet I only occasionally lose weight and not very fast after the first few months — where on that spectrum is the decision made about what’s ok, who is ok?

And who’s making it? And whose RIGHT is it to make that decision? And what science are they choosing to make it based on, since plenty of science demonstrates the complexity and difficulty and unique-per-body nature of this subject?

The New Orphans of Saint Skinny

If my child kicks butt in karate but is chubby, according to the trend in western culture and currently under debate in Great Britain, she should be kidnapped from her parents, institutionalized, force-fed a low-fat high-carb diet (the worst imaginable thing for her genetics and likely to result in her starving, panicked, developing an eating disorder, feeling horrible, and getting fatter), and if that doesn’t work, suffer surgical destruction of her body to FORCE it.

The fact that even adults DIE of this (Die! People who were alive are now DEAD ON THE OPERATING TABLE!) during surgery, is bad enough. If we decide someone’s fat and kill ‘em in a surgery to ‘fix them’, we just did them waaaay, waaaaay, waaaaay more harm than their fat did them.

The fact that most people seem to gain the weight back plus more is bad enough. The stats really don’t look good for this working well for adults, never mind children. The biggest issue is profound nutrient deficiencies (no matter the supplements) and it just so happens children’s bodies have vastly more demands on that score than adult bodies do as they are growing, so imagine for kids it’s likely to be worse.

The brits proposing this travesty say openly that golly, they just don’t have time for any actual medical evidence to show up for why this would be a good idea. That one line ought to have made every onlooker stop the conversation and walk away on the spot, and go back to “intro to ethics” where you don’t take crap you really don’t know anything about and force it on people.

That is doing nothing but test-research on an entire population. You want your kid to be the lab rat?

The fact that a huge number of folks with weight-loss surgery suffer horrible side effects after anywhere from a month to a couple years, and that the lifespan/health past 5 years is SO horrible a statistic that all official agencies officially refuse to admit tracking it AT ALL doesn’t matter, I guess! (”Sorry, we aren’t keeping track of that, heh!”)

If the issue is FAT, all bets are off, all rights are void.

Drive-through Gastric Bypass

All the research that relates to nutrient deficiencies and protein or autoimmune sensitivities and more, that tie deeply into why people (especially children) can become obese, is considered irrelevant. I never and I mean NEVER heard of people doing all these tests prior to deciding to basically starve someone on a low-fat high-carb diet — or recommend surgery. Fatsos should be taken from their incompetent parents, forced into the Official Popular Diet, and if that doesn’t work, gut ‘em.

Ya know, even in the days of slavery you couldn’t just do that to a person on a whim to make ‘em look different, even when you “owned” them. But apparently in our enlightened age, children have fewer rights than even the slaves of old.

So if my cousin has skinny kids, no matter that they may eat 10x as badly as my child, all that matters to her rights, and their rights, is that THEY ARE NOT FAT.

I Cast You Out, Demon Fat!

Fat is the modern projection of evil. Assignment of it comes with all kinds of social side effects, as if being fat also makes you slightly retarded, depraved and immoral, uncontrolled and untrustworthy as well.

The Fat Acceptance Movement — the real threads of it, not the hijacking efforts of “It’s ok to be fat IF you’re fit AND you’re not TOO fat AND you eat whole grains AND you’re trying to lose weight AND…” version — basically seems to see the issue of fat as not a great deal different than race or gender.

At one time, I would have disagreed with that.

It’s the cross of Inquisition: We demand to know! YOU ATE DONUTS FOR ALL THIS FAT, DIDN’T YOU?! DON’T DENY IT! WE KNOW IT MUST BE TRUE! CONFESS, YOU SINNER!

When I was thin. When I believed the Great Calorie Lie. When I honestly thought, when I saw someone really fat, that it must be some staggering amount of sloth and laziness and face-stuffing that arranged it — even though, to the contrary, I had the evidence of a family of women dieting daily in one fashion or another for 20-40 years and never, ever, being thin during all that, as a counterpoint. I would have said, “People can’t choose their parents but they can choose their diet and exercise.”

But really, it’s the same equation. Your genetics set your baseline, your environment till now hugely contributes, and you can work in the present, but you probably can’t use a magic wand to reverse all metabolic damage/changes done over time.

Everybody knows someone who can eat astounding amounts of junk and never get fat. Doesn’t that just suggest that the opposite probably also exists? And prove that bodies are different?

Problem Puzzle Pieces

Much research seems to suggest endocrine issues as primary; some genetic, some from other causes. Drs. Michael and Mary Eades talk about various health issues on their blogs. As one example, Dr. Mike recently talked about the biochemical Leptin. About how it is (related: Everybody’s Different) radically different in people, and how its quantity and/or absorption can have a huge effect on the fat storage of an individual, no pun intended. That’s only one example; he’s covered a whole lot of biochem topics before.

Insufficient chemical X. Overabundance of chemical Y. Under efficiency of thyroid or other gland Z. Over-efficiency of starvation-response metabolic reduction. Notice that nowhere in that paragraph did “Sits around eating donuts all day” show up.

Research seems to be bearing out that the vast majority of weight loss attempts either fail or regress, and that the best thing anybody can do for getting thin is ‘choose naturally thin parents.’ Get real.

Sure, people who starve themselves often end up binging (I have many friends who fight this). People who don’t eat enough often end up storing as fat what they do finally eat no matter what it is (my primary problem). People who are overweight usually have an innate hormonal drive to eat the calories to support their present body weight, which is more for some than others and more than a skinny person would eat, sure. But that does not mean their initial weight gain, or their maintenance of their weight overall, is solely due to eating 4000 calories a day.

And so what if it was?? It’s their life.

Get real! Do you have ANY IDEA how many calories it “allegedly” takes to maintain my weight (that I’m not eating)? For me to intake this (let alone without noticing?!), I’d literally have to EAT A COW, MAN.

If people can drink bourbon, smoke cigarettes, practice unsafe sex, eat dangerous foods, participate in dangerous sports, refuse to take medications, refuse to exercise, and that is PERFECTLY OK WITH THE WORLD for the most part, then why is a fat person choosing NOT to further-screw their metabolism with dieting that they may already know doesn’t work for them, unacceptable?

Just for the record, I’m not building myself an alibi with this. I choose to diet. I choose to lose weight and I believe I can. (Of course, so do the 95-98% of the people it doesn’t work for.)

My point is, it’s a choice. There are people who do not choose to do this. And they have just as much right to make their choice as I do mine.

Fat Acceptance in reality is no different than other issues, in that you can’t accept it only halfway or conditionally, or you completely invalidate the point of accepting it at all.

• It’s not ok to be black only if you have aqualine features;
• it’s not ok to be handicapped only if it’s not more than two limbs and happened in a war;
• it’s not ok to be asian only if you have an advanced degree;
• it’s not ok to be gay only if you act straight so nobody knows (don’t ask, don’t tell!);
• it’s not ok to be female only if you reject femininity and family… ;
• you get the idea.

If any of those things are discussing “another human being,” and it looks like they all are, then the only thing that is ok is the WHOLE spectrum and ALL human beings.

You don’t have to choose a behavior or situation for yourself, you don’t have to agree philosophically or religiously or politically, but that doesn’t mean that in an environment of democracy, in a philosophy based on freedom and the fundamental equality of mankind, that any group should be rejected or invaded.

Fat Acceptance is, philosophically, a lot less about fat than it is about the personal freedom of a human being to be whatever they are.

The minute you put ANY ‘condition’ on that, you’ve just nullified the whole point of it. That means acceptance without:
officially encouraged,
… media-blitzed,
… … culturally-enforced,
… … … politically-manipulated,
… … … … institutionalized hate
of a given class of people.

In this case, of people who are fat.

Which, as a last note, is not an insult. I’m hugely fat. So?

Fat, fat, FAT.

It is a descriptive, not an epithet.

(With thanks to Joy, who made that fabulous point worth repeating.)

P.S. Humor for the day: I had this cartoon in my head — how I wish I could draw! I’ve often thought to be realistic, retail stores should put two vertical lines outside the door, as if it were a ride at a theme park: BUYERS MUST FIT BETWEEN THESE LINES. Haha!

P.S. And on a MORE POSITIVE NOTE, the fabulous MIKA’s third single, delighting in big women, has taken youtube by storm:

If you like Mika, this video is a live song (pop), followed by a live interview with him. He sings a lot of falsetto. The music companies didn’t wanna have much to do with him but he put his videos on the internet and it exploded. Kinda nice to see someone get popular because of popularity and not because some giant evil empire funded their becoming so! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHJlgvoAanw

I often hear people refer to their “relationship with food.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about that subject.

My relationship with food often verges on nun-like: as in, close to “none”. I have to force myself to eat most of the time just to be sure I eat at least once or twice a day, and since my eating plan demands 5-6 eating times a day, that’s really a problem. I have a truly successful day about a couple days a month.

I’m half convinced that severe obesity of the sort caused by starvation-response and then later finally eating, is some kind of half-anorexia, an eating disorder with opposite body-result but from a similar cause.

In the rare event that I start eating a lot more food, a lot more often, weight starts falling off me. So far, that’s pretty well trackable. And the only time I make a point to eat is when I’m lowcarb. Though this last cycle, I’m doing pretty badly with this, and I’m guessing my lack of much weight loss relates to that.

It’s almost like an inverse of the theory that if you are generous with giving away money you will attract more to yourself in some metaphysical way: when I’m generous with eating, fat falls off me, rather similar to how drinking a lot of water will get rid of water weight.

Now, bodybuilding coaches say this is the way it is: that if you eat protein regularly, and don’t over-calorie, fat should reduce. They are all pretty clear that if you don’t eat regularly, especially if you’re eating too few calories, you’ll reduce metabolism and end up gaining fat even on that small amount of calories. They emphasize heavily that if you want to save calories, don’t skip the food, increase the exercise instead. I’m inspired that this is a no-brainer for so many, and I sure wish I’d known all this nearly 20 years ago. But, ok, I know now.

So why the hell is it so hard for me? I know now. So? Why not just do it?

***

Today I had 2.5 eggs and 2oz soyrizo at 8:30am. I was supposed to eat again at 11:30am. Instead I didn’t make myself until like 3:30pm, even though I knew I was supposed to and had time. Nothing except the knowing my best friend would be disappointed in me if I didn’t make some effort finally moved me.

And then, putting together something to eat, I was putting pork and green chili stuff in a little bowl for nuking, and wondering how little I could get away with and still get protein; is this at least 4oz of meat, I wondered? I think so, ok, that’s plenty. As I put the container back in the fridge, I thought, how weird is this? Most people want to eat as much as they can, yet I’m the opposite.

I weigh a ton. My body should be screaming for 4,000 calories a day according to Official Theory. I have plenty of days I’m lucky to get 800 calories if that, and I shouldn’t admit that because my friends are going to beat up on me for my own good now, but I’m really having a problem eating enough to lose weight, as bizarre as that must sound. I can force myself to eat an avocado at noon and feel like that’s just fine for the day.

But that’s not fine. There is something wrong with that. On some level, my intellectual brain can see that this is just not… normal.

I just don’t have any appetite. And even when I do have an appetite, I don’t really “feel like” eating. I can feel that it is some kind of psychological thing at base, because it has that same subtle feeling that I have about situations and people that I don’t feel like having anything to do with. This is subtle. I don’t think I would be aware of this if I wasn’t really paying attention and trying to understand.

If someone drops food in front of me, and I don’t dislike it, I’ll eat it. In fact, if anything I have almost no internal measure of sanity on that count: whether they could give me 3 bites or 3 meals worth, if it’s sitting there and I like the taste of it, I’ll contentedly eat it without any body-recognition of what is appropriate; my body doesn’t say, “You need more calories,” or, “You’ve had enough.” It doesn’t say, “You need steak instead of chocolate” or whatever either. The first time we made chili verde, which was low-carb, I ate 4oz servings of it for like 32 meals in a row. How many people could do that, let alone would voluntarily do so? Because food means almost nothing to me. If I’m ok with the taste, and it’s in front of me, then fine, I’ll eat it, who cares.

My body really doesn’t have anything to say about food at all, except, “I’m not eating it if I don’t like the taste of it.” There’s been times I’ve been feeling like I was starving, and surrounded by food, but if I didn’t “feel like” eating what was available, I’d just walk away hungry.

***

I’m starting to think maybe it is a dissociative effect. I don’t seem to have a direct associative-connect between the sense of hunger or fullness, and the subject of food. It’s almost like they have little to do with each other.

So, for the last 15 years or so, I ate when it was convenient, if something I liked the taste of (read: carbs or sugar) was easy and fast. If it would take 45 minutes to cook I wouldn’t eat. Why should I? If I was hungry I wanted it now, and if I was willing to wait that long for my food then I wasn’t hungry enough to bother eating. It’s a hilarious and pitiful kind of food-laziness that resulted in an entire diet of fast food and occasionally pasta or pizza.

I’d have been fat on that diet anyway, it’s just that the seldom-eating, carb sensitivity, food sensitivities, stress and sleep deprivation and extreme sedentary lifestyle and so on aggravated the issue by a couple hundred extra pounds. If I didn’t have those issues, I’d still be struggling with my weight I think, it just would have much lower than it did.

***

But now I know. I know what it takes to lose weight. I know what caused the gain and what will help heal my metabolism. I have the power, for the first time in my life, to truly control my body and my life and my future.

So why is it SO HARD? Why does it take immense self discipline just to take 10 bites of something I like the taste of? I had food prepared ahead of time today. All I had to do was drop a couple things in a bowl and nuke it for 60 seconds. How hard is that? Yet it took guilt and love to finally move me enough to do it — 4 hours late.

I would seriously think I need therapy for this, but the only eating disorder I know of that comes close to this is anorexia, and I suspect if I walked into a therapist’s office and told them, at this size, that I thought I was half-anorexic, that they’d just laugh and think I was in some bizarre kind of denial.

I can’t afford therapy anyway. I might make up a self-hypnosis regimen but I’m not sure how to focus that. I’m not certain what core problem is sponsoring this ‘behavior issue’ with the food. I don’t lack money, or time, or food, or knowledge. I don’t lack a desire to lose fat as far as I know. I have a positive attitude about all this. And I like food — I love yummy things!

But I’m just off work here today, it’s nearly dinner time, and I’ve managed to ingest about 800 or so calories so far today, and that was with major effort. How much time do I really have to ‘make up for’ that and get a sufficient amount of protein and nutrition in my day? I find myself sitting here most nights thinking, “I shouldn’t eat more than 40g protein at a time, but I need 3+ more meals today to get my protein in… well if I stay up till 2am maybe…”

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. I wish I could sit in on another body for awhile so I could come kick my butt in aggravation.

***

I don’t tend to be real open about ‘allowing vulnerability’ with other people, as a general rule. Is this my “food and love” issue? If I were more a touchy-feely sort that fell in love monthly, instead of a nearly nun-like semi-loner, would I have these eating issues?

I guess I’ll never know. I just wonder if they are related. Maybe a self-hypnosis regimen working on the opening-to-love issue would have some food side-effect if so.

The other day I felt as if I were suddenly dealing with 101 internal demons of emotion, loose and flowing about my mood like ‘free radicals’ of the mind. It wasn’t time for PMS, yet the “turbulence inside me” was severe.

It occurred to me that maybe I was underestimating the effect of doing something that causes the fat cells to empty.

Fat cells store toxins. Which can be internally generated biochemicals that simply did not fully vent as necessary — which sums up most emotion in today’s high stress world. Biogram Theory suggests we store biochemical under the myelin sheath of the nerves, and that could also be affected by changes in fat cells in a given area.

Every fat cell that empties into the bloodstream is reading aloud, inside us, a tiny chapter of a story to us, a story of who we were at the moment we stored that fat.

And who might that be? What emotion might that come with? And what if we lose not just one fat cell at a time, but a whole avalanche of them once in awhile?

Emotion inside the body is biochemical. If we can’t vent it, we store it. Storing emotion in fat, if this indirectly is so, suggests that we might not really be ridding ourselves of it, but merely burying it, till the time we finally use those fat cells… and the ghosts of our emotion come back to haunt us, processing “through” us to be vented, as they should have been in the first place.

After thinking of it that way, I spent the night feeling as if a thousand little elements of me over the last 20 years were weaving through me, like energy motes looking for a doorway out, one denied them for who knows how long. In retrospect I think I should have dived into the turbulence and cried if possible, to help ‘vent’ some of that. Instead, by the time I finally decided to meditate on it, it knocked me out (nothing like sleep=denial) and woke up yesterday in a ‘flatline’ mode of no emotion whatever, not even normal amounts, which is just as much its own issue.

I go into ‘flatline’ and barely eat, breathe, or live: this is my own dysfunction. Some people go into the turbulence and binge themselves sick. Some people go into the turbulence and starve themselves sick. Maintaining balance of food and behavior while losing weight might in fact be more of a challenge than doing so while not losing weight. I haven’t heard this addressed anywhere before. Probably because there’s little if any research on it.

I suspect in some people, this variance in biochemical probably has an even greater effect on their mood. As if while they are working on the new person they want to be, elements of that old person are quite literally flowing through them in the present, sparking or carrying the same emotions that made them gain the fat in the first place.

Who is our fat? Are we ready not just to ‘deal with the fat’, but to ‘deal with’ the emotion it carries, and the toxins that cause current-emotional responses?

Is it losing a part of ourselves… literally? As literally as cleaning out a house is losing all the things we give away and throw away? Is part of the resistance to this change because our overall body/psychology know that it is literally a “loss”?

My grandmother believed in karma. I mean in the very literal balance of the universe kind of way. She believed if you stole a nickel, you would pay that nickel back most certainly. In a sort of funny way this almost struck me like an emotional version of her take on karma: like we cannot get away with denying ourselves, our feelings; that sooner or later, unless the storage contributes to killing us, we are going to have to deal with those feelings; what we don’t vent one day, we will face again when we lose the fat that biochemical stored itself in.

It also makes me wonder if, just like people vary radically in how much insulin they produce, maybe emotional biochemical quantity varies that much too. And if so, if maybe some people ‘need’ to store more fat in order to ‘deal with’ that biochemical that the person is not willing or able to process, than others.

It does sort of give a new way of looking at the idea of Reich’s fat as ‘Body Armor’ theory, yes? That one is not merely protecting themselves from the world; but that the fat storage is quite literally physical protection, via biochemical storage in fat cells rather than having it flow through the body and be experienced and hence vented.

[edited to add: D reminded me, Reich's theory is about muscle tension (stress); it's work based on his theory since then that suggests that fat is a form of body armor.]

This morning I got the book ‘Shape Up by Jonny Bowden’ which my friend Sara recommended. So far it seems pretty sane. It is less a love-fest of any given kind of food, than a focus on the individual and what might work, or not work, for them.

I loved his examples from the works of biochemist Dr. Roger Williams, who wrote Biochemical Individuality, and others in that field. Just the few examples Bowden gave were so impressive that I want to quote the little section of chapter 2 here for others to see and consider.

From the Atlas of Human Anatomy, he reproduces illustrations of nineteen different laboratory speciman human stomachs of dramatically different shape and size and does the same for seventeen different livers. He reports on differences–dramatic differences–among normal healthy infants in leukocytes, neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils, lymphocytes and monocytes. He reports on huge differences in the musculature of the pectoralis minor muscle and on the variations in the amount of islet tissue in the pancrease. He suggests that the potential rate of production for insulin alone probably varies throughout a ten-fold or greater range, and that the number of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas varies from 200,000 to 2.5 million. This, by the way, in normal people. The thyroid gland in normal people varies from a weight of 8 grams to 50 grams. Pepsin, a digestive enzyme produced by the stomach and one of the two most important functional constituents of gastric juice, varies in the normal stomach by a thousand-fold. [...]

“The particular insertion of a muscle in the back of a hand can make the difference between a concert pianist and a person who’s all thumbs,” stated Dr. Alexander Ballin, in a lecture about biochemical individuality and vitamin needs. Twenty-two percent of people have differences in the structure of this muscle; 13 percent don’t have the muscle at all; 1 percent have two muscles.

…I’ll … sum it all up for you in two words: Everybody’s different.

He took on early another topic I consider in need of a voodoo doll and pins:

In 1980, when Consumers Guide published “Rating the Diets,” there were well over 100 diet books for their consideration. With few exceptions, the underlying concept was always this: Eat less. Whatever gimmick the authors sold, they were all buying the same underlying theory: Excess calories make you fat.

[...] During the 1980s and 90s, all manner of low-fat diets prevailed. Fat was the new demon … Pasta and bagels, solely on the basis of their having virtually no fat content, became touted as health foods, which is a little like promoting the Godfather as a role model because he liked to play with his grandkids. [...]

If you’re reading this book, chances are very good that that very diet made you fat or is preventing you from losing weight. And it’s almost certainly not making you any healthier.

[...] [Chemists] now had an objective measure of energy input from food, plus an objective measure of energy output from exercise and activity.

And the tyranny of the calorie equation was born.

He doesn’t discount calories at all, but he points out the (in my opinion vastly) more important issue on the “energy in vs. out” question, with an example and an analogy:

When I taught personal training at New York’s Equinox Fitness Clubs, we had an exercise physiology lab that contained an apparatus called a metabolic cart. You would get on a treadmill and put on a mask attached to a computer that would measure your oxygen intake and your carbon dioxide output at different levels of exercise intensity. Then the computer would calculate your caloric expenditure as you exercised. The individual variations were absolutely astonishing, and they would often vary enormously from what the standard equations would predict.

Suppose I rented a car in Los Angeles and wanted to buy just enough gas to get to San Diego. The distance is 120 miles. If I fill the tank and only use 1/3 of it, there’s no refund and I will have wasted money, so I want to get an idea of how much gas to buy. Think about it for a minute and see if you can guess the answer to this question: How many gallons should I purchase?

…There’s no correct answer unless you have one missing critical piece of information, which I didn’t give you. Before you can answer the question of how many gallons of gas I need, you have to answer another question: What kind of car did I rent?

If I rented a jeep I met get only ten miles to the gallon, but if I rented a Volkswagon I might get thirty. And it’s the same thing with calories. … we are all metabolically unique.

It’s about damn time someone pointed this out. I understand that science has already demonstrated sufficient research to support the point, but even many scientists just don’t seem to get it. If someone who weighs as much as me can eat fewer calories than someone who weighs 130 lbs should, and not lose weight (or at any rate remotely resembling the math), then obviously anybody who thinks that the whole weight gain/maintenance/loss equation is a matter of those numbers is misinformed.

As the saying goes, it only takes one white crow to disprove the theory that all crows are black. There are plenty of people with metabolisms like mine who put the lie to the ‘calorie theory’. There isn’t any doubt what a calorie is going in; but how that food is processed inside the body, and how many calories the body needs to use for its own maintenance, obviously varies so radically, that the calories-in numbers become almost “not applicable” to the answer: because we don’t know enough about the individual body’s processing to even know the real question.

Anyway that’s about as far as I got in the book. I recommend it so far.

“If you want something to get done, give it to the busiest person.”
– business maxim

Have you ever noticed that when scheduled, more stuff seems to get accomplished? Do you ever have those times where you go through an hour, a day, a week or weekend, a month, and it seems like not a whole helluva lot actually got done in the end?

I’ve been thinking about a variety of motivational menus along these lines; there’s a whole smorgasbord of spiffy slogans and precise little plans that one could use to schedule their life as well as German trains.

I was looking around my house earlier. You’ve heard the saying, “the walls talked back,” perhaps. My walls probably would, but they are muffled and gagged by the amount of junk stuck in front of them, waiting for something to be done.

My house projects, life projects, health projects, kid projects, garage projects, and other “goals” are starting to stretch into the horizon of infinity.

And if I’m not making a ton of headway on them, perhaps it is because I am not really trying. I am not constantly reminded of them. I don’t have any actual schedule for them. They just become “wishes,” lost to the binary oblivion of blogging or the neurological randomization of daydreams and unfulfilled plans.

It’s time to expand my horizons, increase my recognition of my own potential, and explore the increased ‘attention’ value that reminder and planning for goals brings.

So to this end I am creating The Fabulous 52. Also known as, “52 accomplishments I will get off my ass and do within the next calendar year, because I rock and I deserve to do that for myself.”

These have to be possible — and reasonable — for happening within a year from now. Nothing that will take 2 years in any sane guess, or will require more money than 3 years of saving could come up with. They have to be things I control, e.g., I can’t count my kid’s hopeful weight loss in there no matter how much I want to help her, that’s her goal not mine. It can be anything from a construction project to a spiritual goal.

There are 52 weeks in a year. How much is it to ask that I “average” accomplishing one thing of importance a week? (It can vary of course, I might do none on the list for a few weeks, then cover a dozen in the next couple.) If the things I would put on my F-52 list are not worth having some priority, why are they on the list? It needs to be stuff I really do want to get done. I can add and remove things from the list over time.

The important thing is that I take the time to MAKE the list and to POST it somewhere, yes ON PAPER ’cause I’m a luddite, in my house, so I can SEE it. And to make a weekly habit of briefly reviewing it. 30 seconds a week to review. How hard is that? So the list takes time? — how much time do I spend on the internet? I have time to make a list of what is truly important to me.

So next up, soon as I get them worked out (or most of ‘em anyway), is my Fabulous 52 for the next year of my hopefully productive life!

My best friend was telling me how he perceives me very much like this:

Which was funny because a few minutes later he happened to click on my Tomboy Tough blog, where I was talking about the tragi-comic nature of today’s workout, where I described myself, as usual, like this:

I cracked up. That is how differently we perceive me. He thinks I’m courageous that I am working on exercise no matter that it’s so hard for me. I feel like… well, you know.

It’s sorta funny though. I guess we all perceive ourselves differently than those around us do.

And of course you can tell we are both total nerds, with our Star Wars references. ;-)

I’ve been reading online the last couple weeks. A lot about weight, obesity, and things like that. And one of the more interesting, if distressing, things is reading peoples’ comments about some articles, posts, etc.

It got me to thinking back to pretty much everyone I know, all the times I’ve eaten in public with others, etc. And what I want to know is this: who watches the skinny?

I’ve seen people eat enough food for two full days of meals at dinner and not blink, and then eat dessert on top of it. I’ve dined with people who ate so much starch/sugar in their meal it’s amazing they didn’t pass out on the floor an hour later from the blood sugar drop. I’ve sometimes hung out with people who noshed on junk morning, noon and night, partied and drank, and considered ice cream a food group.

And most of these people had a completely unreasonable, and inaccurate, “pride” in themselves for not being fat. Like the majority of people commenting on the internet, they really believed that fat people were doing something they weren’t, something unreasonable and probably shocking, which got them into that situation.

It never occurs to people that maybe skinny people eat like hell too. That some of the biggest junk food addicts and sweet tooth fanatics are skinny people.

If merely eating badly made people fat, I suspect the population of morbidly obese people would be 3x what it is now. It’s obvious that eating badly makes SOME people fat. But not others. This is a no-brainer, I admit.

So where does the open prejudice against the obese come from? Is it society’s last -ISM? People aren’t allowed to openly despise others for being a given race or a given religion anymore, but it’s perfectly ok — in fact, all experts and the media at large agrees — that despising and mocking people who are fat is perfectly ok. And the entire basis of this is: they ate themselves into it.

Yes… that’s true, although not necessarily because they ate donuts constantly; there are other ways to “eat yourself fat,” including eating a lot of carbs when you’re insulin resistant, eating foods you have body intolerances for, not eating often enough, and other non-food issues that contribute. Usually it’s a combination of things.

(I think one reason lowcarb works so well for so many, is because by default, nearly by accident, it tends to wipe out food people commonly are sensitive to, such as gluten-foods and milk.)

But from my observation, half the skinny people I know have eaten themselves into what would be 300 lbs if their bodies worked like some other peoples’ bodies.

Yes, I know quite a few people who are thin and who eat well and exercise and certainly “deserve” to be thin. But I also know a lot of people, by far the majority, who eat just as badly as any fat person I’ve known.

They eat junk, and lots of it, when upset. They eat junk, and lots of it, for every imaginable holiday, party, or special event. They eat deep fried burritos off the lunch truck and donuts at the office for breakfast and too much for dinner. But you know what?

Nobody stares at them. Nobody looks at their plate in restaurants, as if to assure themselves that if it contains anything but dry carrot sticks, “No wonder that person is so fat.” Nobody watches them shop like it’s the court’s incriminating eyewitness evidence for their figure.

Because they aren’t fat. So nobody cares how they eat.

I think a lot of people who get fat, do get that way through sheer junk eating, but ironically, a lot of them do it after eating that way for many years with no result. And then one day, after a lifetime of carb overdose, their body starts getting insulin resistant. And the pounds start packing on. And the more fat cells, the bigger the metabolic problem, so it starts to become exponential. And then, yes, they too are fat. But for a good portion of their life, they ate that way and weren’t.

It would make more sense if so many thin people, many of whom I’ve known and who certainly eat worse than I ever did if gluttony is any measure, didn’t feel such arrogant pride about how they are NOT fat and other people ARE and so they have an “opinion” about those other people. Don’t look, Ethyl! Can you imagine what that woman had to do to weigh THAT MUCH?!

And in public places, I see people watching me. It’s not just paranoia; I used to be thin, I gained weight very rapidly while immersed in work and school, and when I surfaced, the difference in peoples’ reaction to me was mindblowing. I know it’s not just my projection, people really do “react” — literally taken aback by my size, quickly followed by the culturally-indoctrinated response of sheer disgust, aversion, or embarrassment. Much like I told my child, “Don’t stare at the man with the missing arm, it’s rude!”, that rule seems to hold for many people on looking at overly fat people. It’s a horrible disfigurement; it qualifies for the “look away” response. But most people don’t look away — they just look.

They watch my shopping basket. They watch my restaurant dinner plate. They watch me with that look on their faces, often, as if they can’t imagine what truly bizarre sinful behavior I had to indulge in; surely, it’s nothing they’ve ever done, or that nobody they know has ever done.

If they were watching the skinny, they’d know better.

Bodybuilders may be experts at losing fat, but I am an expert at gaining it. Gee I wonder if I could relocate to Africa and be a high paid consultant for the cultures that consider fat beautiful.

I outlined a new eating plan for myself previously based on doing the exact opposite of what I did to get so fat. It’s a great plan. Except that because it’s more about sanity and moderation, neither area being a strong point for me obviously, I very shortly failed to be on any plan at all.

This was followed by my attempts to work out a carb-calorie-fat cycling plan based on Tom Venuto’s plan. That whole percentage thing ended up so complicated to work out my menus for that I gave up. So from January to mid-May I had no plan, gained a little back, mostly water weight, and I am nearly back to where I left off. It’s aggravating to have to keep “retracing” steps I already worked hard for.

Friends and I were talking the other day about how the long “stalls” people claim really should probably be considered “maintenance for awhile” in some cases. When people can’t really focus/plan/cook/eat/exercise as they need to for losing weight, but they are at least not relapsing into cultural lousy eating habits, it isn’t really a failure to lose weight, but a success in staying on plan and NOT gaining any. No matter how long it takes to gradually lose weight, if one is not gaining it, it could definitely be worse. I’m here to tell you… it could be worse.

o0o

With the wisdom of hindsight, I now understand that anything “sane” and “moderate” will not work for me at the moment, because if I am not “forced to pay close attention and count stuff,” then I am simply not paying enough attention, period. Attention, intention, and expectation are critical to the success of anything. I’m very driven by what’s in my head… I’m convinced that my weight loss is not just a matter of numbers but a matter of what I want to create in my reality.

I also admit that I have not been particularly good at following any plan at all. That I have done ok losing weight can probably be chalked up solely to the fact that I weighed so damn much to begin with.

Problems: I don’t eat often enough, and don’t eat enough protein, enough calories, or even enough carbs (since I usually do want to stay in a certain range) most days. This is a combination of factors. First, that most of my life I didn’t eat until night, and so it’s easy for me to shine on or just forget to eat until late afternoon or evening. Second, that I’m lazy and tend to fail to plan and fail to prepare, resulting in me not having food available when I am working or otherwise busy, so I end up skipping food since I haven’t time to cook and don’t want to eat off-plan.

I know that a lot of people who have problems eating too much, or binging, or craving carbs, probably dream of having my problem. But the reality is that I got this fat greatly thanks to the ’starvation response’ to begin with. I’ve often tracked my food alongside someone else’s who weighed like 1/4 – 1/3 what I did, and eaten the same things, same quantities, and not lost weight. That’s why I get so irked when people act like if someone is morbidly obese they must just be daily ingesting 3 pounds of bon-bons so gosh, if they’d just stop that, surely all would be well. Obviously between body metabolism, food allergens, eating frequency and more, there are other considerations.

But I am determined to set a goal and a standard, and just work toward achieving that. For the remainder of my 12 week cycle (about 9 1/2 weeks), I am going to EXPERIMENT with a carb cycling ketogenic diet. Let’s see how it works. My weight chart is online, I’ll add in my CCKD info somewhere so if there is a correlation after a few weeks of it, between loss/gain/unchanged, maybe it will be apparent to all.

o0o

Big Daddy D started a carb cycling plan after hearing me talk about this many months ago. He posted results that he had. It is SO invaluable for lowcarbers to actually experiment with this stuff, and document the results. If we don’t do this kind of experimentation, it just isn’t done, or isn’t known to us.

I am using a TWO WEEK CYCLE (14 days). Technically I’m beginning 6/1 tomorrow, but the start of ‘week 1′ on the cycling plan actually begins Monday 6/4.

Life is an experiment. I have proved fabulously successful at the unintentional Getting Hugely Fat experiment. Now I want to continue my trials in the Getting Vastly Thinner experiment. If this doesn’t work, I’ll do something else. But I think it will. Now that I have everything — food journal, weight tracking, exercise tracking — publicly on googledocs for anybody to see, I guess everybody will be able to see just how successful (or not!) I might turn out to be with the new experiment. Wish me luck. ;-)

The low-fat crazed world is convinced that my eggs in the morning and my pork stew is going to kill me, sooner rather than later. If the official party line about health had any truth to it, I would have already expired from veins clogged solid and blood pressure in the stratospheric count.

But funny enough, even in the lowcarb world, there’s a whole cornucopia of warning labels people hang out for education. And they are probably all correct. But as a friend of mine pointed out, sometimes it seems there is no end to it!

A talk came up about yummy chorizo. Which led to my pointing out it is pig lymph nodes, which are the toxin collectors of the body, and I find it too gross to eat.

So I eat Soyrizo, a substitute that is nearly indistinguishable from chorizo. But this leads to posts about the many deadly dangers of humans ingesting soy.

OK, so maybe a reader thinks, “OK then! I’ll have some bacon or sausage with those eggs instead.” But no, then you get to hear about all the terrible nitrites in those.

“Ok, ok!” our fictional lowcarber protests. “Then I’ll just have a small burger patty, that’s simple and quick.” But wait, there’ll be a whole page about how well-cooked meats are not so good for you and really we should be eating them nearly raw.

(And don’t even THINK of doing serious reading about Mad Cow Syndrome or you may never eat meat again.)

“That does it!” you hear. “I’ll just have a freakin protein drink already!” No babe, don’tcha know, that is PROCESSED and not really “food”?!

***

And this is on top of the fact that most anything that ever even thought about being a grain, mating with a grain, or residing in the same package as a grain, is probably doing damage to a huge chunk of the population through grain/gluten intolerance.

Oh yeah, and about a zillion people are sensitive to caseine, the protein in milk.

And if you make all those yummy foods you’re using artificial sweetener. You just know that no matter how great sucralose (what’s in splenda) seems today, in 10 years (if that) we’ll be hearing about how it kills you.

But wait, there’s more. Turns out there’s plenty of suggestion that merely the sweet “taste” of something can cause insulin spikes by association.

For godssakes! So we have Pavlov’s Pancreas, too. Great.

***

Recently I posted here about making processed foods in the home — using eggs, butter, protein powder, flax seed meal, etc. etc. to create high-protein cocoa muffins, for example. I was saying, is it any worse to do that, than to have eggs fried in butter, a teaspoon of flax seeds and a protein drink? If so, why?

Here on the blog the comments were like, hey whatever keeps you on plan. On my LC journal the comments were more like, that’s the wrong direction man, you should be eating real food.

But most ‘real food’ isn’t portable in a ziplock without refrigeration for a couple of days, for instant-grab yummy munchy food that is also good numbers for my daily eating goals. And eating muffins, or mock danish as a friend of mine does (and she certainly lost weight), regularly, doesn’t mean one is not also eating meat and veggies.

It might mean, though, that you stayed on-plan.

Though I guess, maybe it wasn’t a very good plan. Maybe.

***

I think in a perfect world, we would all live on turkey, broccoli, pecans, avocados, and some fresh herbs and lots of water. (I’m ignoring the many things that could be warnings, even about those.)

But in the real world, I don’t have a butler, so I live on what I had the time, money, and energy to make for myself. The easier something is to make, the longer something lasts, and the easier it is to eat the leftovers, the higher a rating it gets in my Worthy Foods Book.

I think the better people get at eating ‘real food’, the healthier they’re likely to be. Then again, if food or time or money or frankly, energy to do something proactive is limited — or appetite, or foods you’re not sensitive to or don’t dislike, are limited — then you take what you’ve got.

You do the best you can with the options available to you, and hope to live another day to work toward that perfect-world dietary plan. Chances are, soy and chorizo and bacon and processed protein powder are not going to kill you done in moderation.

Obesity, however, is pretty damn dangerous. (And miserable if you ask me.)

If eating protein donut holes or a mock danish every day for a year is your idea of a high protein breakfast, well, if it helped keep you on plan, got you enough protein, kept down your carbs, kept down your calories if necessary, and helped you lose some of that fat, then I’d say it turned out to be a good thing, didn’t it?

Who knows? Less weight and sufficient protein for the long term might mean more energy for more focus on whole roasted chickens in your future.

Wait, don’t tell me. That stuff will KILL me, because . . .

Well, there you go. Whine, kvetch, gripe, blog, and then throw yourself on your bed and cry your head off until you fall asleep. It worked for me. But finally that glorious time of the month arrived, and I quit feeling like alt.FatGirl.die.die.die and got on with my life.

Today I was reading the blog Weight of the Evidence, and she was talking about trying to successfully live, let alone lowcarb, on a pitifully small amount of money.

It got me thinking about gardens. You know, the last century’s radical shift away from gardening is not just about free time. If anything people have more free time than they ever did, culturally — they just have other priorities, of course. I suspect it’s more about a trend of basically avoiding responsibility, in a way. I don’t mean if you don’t have a garden you’re irresponsible (haha!), I mean that as a culture at large it seems like we grow more and more toward “paying someone to feed us or fix us.”

Like to example the latter, my friend didn’t want to do lowcarb because her doctor said it was unhealthy, so now she’s on a drug to relieve acid reflux. Or another woman I met who said she had a gastric bypass not just for the weight issue but “to deal with major medical problems” like acid reflux. Holy cats on a pogo stick batman! Apparently the second one didn’t know that 10 days on lowcarb (off gluten in particular) solved my major acid reflux problem instantly, bam, GONE — and the first just didn’t care. Don’t bother me with facts. Don’t expect me to eat well. Here’s money. Give me a pill and shut up about it.

Well as much as so many folks wax on about “fresh fruits and vegetables,” I’m led to think that they don’t know much about the vegetables sitting in their walmart produce section. The carbs are often much higher, the nutrients vastly lower, in what you buy at the store, because those are genetic strains designed for single-point harvesting (not gradually like most plants), and to withstand shipment in a box over long distances without visible bruising or spoilage, and to taste as sweet as possible. In short, they are designed to be big sweet cardboard. Kind of like the breakfast cereal version of vegetables. Not to say they’re bad!–they’re not. Just to say that most the stuff in the grocery just doesn’t compare to what you can grow at home.

(By the way. You can even grow mushrooms at home. We buy mushroom compost, from a local firm that sells the typical little white ones you get in the store. It’s usually pretty hot (not really ready to be used IN the garden, needs some more biodegrading) but we dumped some in a bed we weren’t using. Months later, we pulled out several groups of mushrooms, that were literally like 9″ circumference. I’d never seen anything so gigantic. Apparently these little guys don’t have a growth limit on them, they are simply harvested at that size consistently. You can get mushroom kits from most seed selling sources.)

My point is that it’s close to free — not quite but nearly so, moreso over time — to grow your own vegetables, that are as fresh and nutritious as they can be.

If you have, anywhere on your property, a square of even occasional sunlight, even in short-day climates, of at least 2 foot by 2 foot in size (well you could do 12″x12″ but that is really cutting it close! ;-)), you can grow a small garden.

I’m serious. Anybody who has not read the terrific book “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew, please do yourself a favor and read it. It is SO worth the read. It’s simple, interesting, kinda humorous in spots, and lays out a garden plan that is actually fun, even for kids. You can sometimes find it in libraries or used. It shows you how you can grow the maximum yield (food) in the minimum amount of space, soil, water, and effort.

Since the dawn of whatever time God, Aliens or Happy Chance taught man that sticking seeds or fruits in the ground would make something grow, mankind has been growing food. If you went back a century, in any country you may live in, you’d probably find a great majority of the population (outside the inner cities of course) who flat out could not have lived were it not for the serious gardening they did (and often other things, like raising chickens and goats, making butter, etc.).

Let me repeat that. People grew food because they could not afford to shop much, especially if they had lots of kids. So why does that never seem to occur to people today??

I used to do programming for my living and I don’t know if it’s related, but I was kinda worried about Y2K. No, I was not buying a gun and a fallout shelter in Montana. I was buying stored bulk food and medical supplies in case the apt. complex across the street, full of old women and single moms and kids, faced some bureaucratic no welfare checks today kind of problem.

I was pretty casual about it until the official meeting with the president and leaders of all major media sources resulted in a total blackout on the subject except for the occasional mocking of someone worried. Had they said, “Well it could be an issue, but we don’t expect it. It’s a good idea if y’all keep some water and food and TP around in case the just in time inventory system, computer driven as it and bulk product transportation and fuel often is, has any difficulties,” then I would have done exactly that and not worried about it. But the mysterious silence instead — I guess applying that “don’t ask, don’t tell” motto to leadership, as well as other controversial subjects — completely freaked me out. I had a 2 year old at the time I first started thinking about it. As any mother knows, this is related, of course. The biological instinct to protect the child is overwhelming.

So I set out to educating myself. I read so much stuff via internet and via book that it was like cramming for a hard college final, but every single day for like 18 months. I know more about making a homemade brick wall from scratch, delivering babies, baking without an oven, and composting human waste, then you could ever want to know, as just a few examples.

Totally by accident, I came to realize that not only was I a city girl, but I was utterly ignorant, totally dependent, and would basically die left to my own devices. I really had no idea how ignorant I was until I really started studying everything. And one of the most astonishing, horrifying, yet interesting subjects I ended up reading a ton about was natural gardening.

Some people think that even as you read this, somewhere, some machiavellian evil overlord is conspiring to squash research for lowcarb and push carbs not just for product sales but to make the medical industry yet more money and humans yet more dependent on pharmaceutical.

Well, I don’t know about that. Probably. Maybe?

But I do know that even as you read this, those sorts are conspiring and implementing every plan they can to make it so food seeds are unavailable to the public, so food is patented and licensed and seeds aren’t even allowed to be kept or sold or traded, or if they are, they are designed to not work at all for a second season’s growth.

I know, it sounds extreme. It is like an onion, if you study this subject, you just keep thinking it can’t get any worse, and the more you learn, the more you’re just completely lost for words on what a ‘Grand Plan’ it seems to be at some level and how well it is working thanks to the ignorance and unconcern of our population. When I started reading about seed saving and the whole situation of seeds in our world, I was stunned. Were it not for the amazing efforts of a small number of die-hard, ridiculously driven, overworked altruists over the last couple decades in particular, to found tons of seed saving organizations and share seeds and develop farms just to perpetuate and keep rare seed strains alive, and to gather seeds from all over the world — the situation would be 100x worse today than it would have been without them.

I know most people think you just go to the store and buy a packet of seeds. Easy, right?

A few are the sort that will reproduce next year if you know how to save them properly, if you prevent cross contamination of the crop, if you store the seed well, if you have decent soil (which is generally built, not bought). Most of them aren’t. Most of them will grow nifty oversized and over-sweetened (carby!) vegetables and fruits for you and if you want to grow anything next year, you’ll need to go buy more seeds, or what you’ll get may or may not look or taste anything like what you plan.

Now look again at how many options you have in that store. Do you realize that there are hundreds of types of peas alone? Who knew?? How many of those do you see available to you in the store? Probably one. Maybe two. How many different companies do you see on those seed packages — and do you know if they actually share a parent company?

Most people have never given a second thought to the subject of gardening and seeds and the availability of seeds — and seeds that will bear fruit you can collect seeds from to grow another season — I certainly hadn’t. Might be worth your time. Especially if you don’t have much money.

It’s a basic survival skill. It’s the sort of thing we all should know a little about, just because we are human, just because we eat to survive.

And it’s more fun and not as much work if you do it right. Even I at 482 lbs could garden — you just plan it to fit what you can do. Even a small planter, near enough your door/traffic that you see it regularly so watering and care is easy and totally minor, can grow more ’stuff’ than you might imagine! Yummy stuff. Green onions and a diced small roma tomato and a pinch of an herb can make a major difference in a morning’s scrambled eggs.

And add a lot to your health. And save a lot for your pocketbook!

Many of the people I read online (such as in forums) are really, really concerned about what their scale says each day. More than concerned. Some folks if not actually bound and gagged would be weighing themselves by the hour. Hoping for a better number. Despairing if it doesn’t show up. The more someone weighs themselves, the more they seem to be psychologically affected by it (which is logical, as the degree of their psychological stress about the subject is probably what determines how often they weigh themselves).

Now if we were talking about what the scale said in general, like for a few days running, this would make sense to me. They are working toward better health and fitness, so obviously, being able to see they lost or gained weight matters.

But every day? Twice a day? More??

The body is a great part fluid, which is pretty heavy. And the exact percentage and quantity of that fluid varies, with many factors involved. Some of these factors are well known: The fewer carbohydrates you eat, the less your body will retain water. The more sodium you ingest, the more your body will retain water. The more water you drink, the less your body will retain water. When my Monthly Mess is about to arrive, the body in its need to dilute and rinse out the womb, collects massive water in the tissues to be sure it has it available.

There are 4,982 other reasons for “fluctuation of fluidic levels in the body,” of course. They are all secret. Only 3 people know them, and they would have to shoot you if they told you.

Now given this situation, and given that our food and liquid intake varies a little, the body and external temperature varies, the precise amount of exercise varies, the hormonal levels (of both men and women) vary, and with most scales, even the way you stand on it might make it vary, it seems to me the general lesson here is something like:

It varies.

I understand the need for feedback. If one isn’t observing results, re-evaluating strategy, and implementing change when needed, then it isn’t much of a plan.

But at some point you gotta ask yourself, is my monitoring serving a purpose of correction and/or inspiration? Or is it causing me more angst in the long run, with the constant variations?

I think psychology plays a great role in weight loss and change of fitness level. Weighing is supposed to be a realistic feedback and, hopefully, at least occasional inspiration. I have seen people who are actually losing weight, consistently week by week, who literally spend at least half of their days per week stressed and worried and guilty because so often the number had gone up slightly instead of down. Well when the overall trend is good, but a good number of daily weighings make ya feel bad, then the psychology is now more harm than help. I call the scale obsession the “Faint-by-Number” plan.

I see people in the forums saying things like, I ate this and that and today I’m two pounds heavier! So I guess food X is bad for me! — er, well you know, maybe, maybe not. Might have had more sodium. Might be an intolerance issue. Might be one of a zillion other even unrelated factors. If it was 7500 calories in the middle of the night then ok, it might have made you fatter. But otherwise, small weight fluctuations are going to happen just like mood fluctuations do: they are both about the balance of the body, which is not a static thing in one place, but a dynamic process constantly re-re-adjusting to homeostasis. I also see the opposite effect: Well I ate birthday cake last night and I’m down half a pound this morning so it’s fine! Heh. Well, you know… the longer-term numbers, and whether carb cravings knock someone off plan, will tell.

I’m not saying the Faint-by-Number approach is inherently wrong; some people really need that constant feedback. I’m just saying that I observe it is demoralizing when weight loss that is not rapid is approached that way, as their comments indicate.

o0o

For those who would really like to weigh EVERY SINGLE DAY I thought this might help. You can download free here in Excel format a simple spreadsheet that will not only let you track your weight, but will give you a 3-day, 7-day and 10-day “average” of your weighings. This is an idea I got from someone else I cannot recall the name of now (sorry). It allows you to see the “trend” of the weight change, not just the daily numbers. Also there is a page that automatically gives you a little graph of your weight as well. There are only a few tiny instructions, to set the date and graph for your unique numbers, they’re on the sheets and easy.

Folks who already have spreadsheets, or are tracking their weight in a free online place like fitday.com won’t need this, but for those to whom spreadsheets are greek, it might be helpful. Click on the pic below to download the spreadsheet file, save it to your hard drive, and then open it in Excel. If you don’t have that program, try Open Office, an awesome office product that has the equivalent of all MS’s stuff, FREE, and will open Excel (as well as Word docs, Powerpoints, etc.) just fine.

Click on the pic below to download the xls file. Save it to your disk (remember where!) and open it in a spreadsheet program.

Now look at the averaged columns. Note that on the (fake) date 6/3 our (fake) person gained half a pound. But the 3 day average shows 0.1 lb lost since the last measure; the 7 day average shows .3 lbs lost since then; and the 10 day average shows 0.6 lbs lost.

So on days when you feel like freaking out because your weight is higher, consider the larger “trend.” Look at how the numbers move in the averaged columns. Much less “wiggle factor” than the day to day weights. When the 3 day, 7 day, especially 10 day, averages are moving, then you really know that it’s more than a variation or fluke, you’re not just guessing. If the larger averages aren’t growing much, relax a little. It MIGHT just be the normal variations of the body. :-)

One of my favorite things about experimenting with lowcarb foods is the amazing combinations. It’s like magic, or Star Trek’s Replicator. It goes in as an almond, it comes out a dense bread-like thing. That’s bizarre. And wonderful!

I never knew about the ability of egg and protein to combine into a semi bread-like texture for example, since typical highcarb eating combines eggs with powdered, nutrient-stripped sugar-cardboard grains as flour instead.

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I think it’s important (I’ve said this before) that lowcarbers not name half their foods like “fake versions of highcarb stuff”. So for example I don’t call it mock apple pie, I call it Zucchini cobbler, and then say in a subtitle it tastes just like apple pie. As long as people are comparing lowcarb dishes to highcarb dishes, or only evaluating lowcarb foods by “how much like” highcarb foods they are, then psychologically, as well as to others, it’s a “specialty diet”, not just different foods. (Because then you’re not really saying “I eat different foods” but rather, “I eat the same foods in a substituted form”. Kinda like the plainwrap or no-name version instead of a popular brand.)

I think lowcarbers should be delighted that cauliflower can do a dish that tastes a lot like twice-baked cheese potatoes, or chicken fried rice, but I think that should have its own name that lowcarbers learn to love, not “I’m pretending to be a potato or rice.” I think we should celebrate the food our eating plan has, not as a substitute for high carb food, but as its own culinary delight. Who knows? Maybe some lowcarb foods, if they are not pretending to be fakes of highcarb, but are just proud to stand on their own as what they are, might migrate into a few highcarb diets as well. Plenty of highcarbers are willing to try a cauliflower dish. But they have no reason to try a ‘fake potato’ dish since they can just eat potatoes.

In California where I grew up, there was this place called Kaiser’s Nutrition. They had carob flavored “Hercules Flips” drinks. The first time I got one, I did it as ‘fake chocolate’ — I thought it was a substitute of sorts, and I thought it was healthier. (Oh brother.) At first, I was disappointed, because really, it didn’t taste a damn thing like chocolate. But then later, I realized that it tasted really, really GOOD, and I loved it! In fact, it has a unique taste unlike anything else I’ve ever had. As a substitute for chocolate, it was pitiful. As a new food I’d never tried, I loved it. If you see what I mean.

It made me realize that how we “frame” our perceptions about our food is important. Substitutes are always ‘diet’ or ‘fake’ foods, psychologically, not their own thing.

There are many foods — curry, pesto, etc. — that do not taste like anything else in the universe but what they are. They are “new” to people the first time. If they were presented as a substitute for something else, they would surely be a disgustingly poor version of whatever it was. But on their own, they’re divine foods!

o0o

Over in the lowcarber.org forum, a member named Atlee posted this great recipe she called “protein powder donut holes.” After about 100+ replies to the thread, most ravingly positively, I finally got around to trying them. I’d like to officially offer thanks and prayers for a long happy lowcarb life to Atlee for sharing it freely!

My versions of things are seldom exactly like the original, and then I usually number them like software and they “evolve” as I try different flavor or other variations. I can later refer to v1.7 and v2.3 as my favorites worth keeping, for example. I rename them, partly to match what I think is best descriptive, and partly because it seems unfair to represent someone else’s recipe in a way that is not what they provided. (I do always provide refs and links to the source, teacher’s pet that I am.)

These things (protein batter deep fried into balls) are totally reminiscent to me — in appearance, not taste — of “Hush Puppies” (fried balls of cornmeal batter). So I am calling them:

Protein Puppies

Ingredients:

1 scoop protein powder (I used Designer Whey, Vanilla Praline)
1 egg (I used large)
1/2 cube (1/4 cup) butter, fully melted (I used regular salted)
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract (I used artificial as it’s way lower carb)
2-3 Tbsp sweetener equivalent (I used 6-8 drops of sweetzfree)
coconut oil in a small deep saucepan, about 1″ deep of it

Nuke butter to fully melt it, stir in everything else, stir well. Let sit for a few minutes. Stir again. Original creator suggested using an ice cream scoop but I only had a large table spoon. Heat oil to boiling. Drop in a spoon(s) of the batter stuff in the pan. It poofs up into balls with the heat. Flip them over, only takes several seconds till they are done. Drop on a plate with paper towels (to drain oil). The ones I cooked longer that were pretty dark brown were better. I think it made 6-8 of these (my sizing was inconsistent).

They came out with a nature and look rather like hush puppies: sorta crispy outside, dense yet light somehow (bit breadish) inside. Ry and I were amazed at the result (given the ingredients), they were really good!

Click the image below to see a nutrition count with ingredients and instructions; print in landscape mode and it should fit on one page.



Alrighty then. I think I’m going to try and make this again today and put the stuff in a ziplock and squeeze it into the oil more like a funnel cake and see how it is. Calianna said she tried it like that and it was really good. But first I think I have to come up with some kind of something to dip it in. Big Daddy D mentioned LC cinnamon rolls (oh my gosh!) so I’m off to see if his blog has any ideas for a sweet dip. I do remember seeing cinnamon streussal something on there, yum!

P.S. or maybe I’ll just break down and try Tracy’s Chocolate Mayo Pound Cake which actually does look pretty darn good.

Edited to add: I tried it again with strawberry protein powder and didn’t like it. I forgot the sweetener though! Don’t do that. :-) I did it like a funnelcake but I didn’t care for it that way cause (a) it was thinner and the inside wasn’t as moist and (b) I overcooked it by cooking it to the same color of the balls-ideal. So if you do the funnelcake format (cut tiny hole in corner of ziplock with the batter), it doesn’t need to be cooked as long as the balls. We are talking about only seconds of difference here really. :-)

Today I’ve been thinking about processed foods. I’m not talking about Pasteurized Process American Cheese Food kind of processed foods, or even the Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese kind of processed food. I’m talking about the potential difference — or not? — between foods I make in my kitchen, versus well, foods I just eat, maybe with minimal prep. And whether one is better or worse. Is it the ingredients? The % of processed ingredients in the overall product resulting? The morality of “raw” vs… whatever?

I think I’m a guilt-freak and I’m trying to figure out if I should feel guilty about making concoctions out of stuff like protein powder, flax, eggs, cream cheese, like, “You should be eating chicken and salad! There’s no excuse!” or whether I should say “Hey, it tastes good, it has good nutrient-numbers, it keeps me on plan, so it’s good.”

There is a ‘ground base’ we could start with. Vegetables and fruits. If you buy them fresh, or better yet pick them fresh, that’s as close to unprocessed as you can get. So we all assume that this is the best thing in the world, right? Assuming the veggie or fruit is not so sugar/starch laden that it functions like nature’s pasta once it hits your innards. And of course fresh spices, which rock.

Then we move to ‘mildly affected’ foods. I go to the butcher shop which sells me the 1/4 of a side of beef from a local grass-fed farmer’s cow just taken a couple days before, and he gives me a bunch of frozen shrink-sealed stuff that looks vaguely like a frightening science experiment, perhaps some new version of The Blob that too much time thawing on my counter could unleash on my innocent small town, but I know it will look like meat when unpackaged. Before I eat this, I have to cook it, no matter what my cats think of this uncivilized practice. So that is somewhat processed but it is “mostly” unchanged. I think.

What about seeds I grind? Surely a flax seed in 412 eeeny-weensy pieces is no less healthy than a flax seed whole? Is a flax seed eaten plain vs. mixed into a protein drink vs. baked in a muffin any different?

Then we move to processed foods. First, the dairy. I use cream, half & half, sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, blue cheese, cheddar cheese, ok let’s just be clear, I pretty much worship cheese in every form it may come in, not counting cheap American processed cheese food in little plastic wrapped slices which I consider an affront to the Cheese God that I will not abide. To be fair, hard cheeses are only processed in their root creation, far as I know; however all the other dairy stuff is pasteurized at the least, homogenized probably.

I’m not sure what either of those are in detail except according to my father, who spent his childhood swiping the big lump of cream at the top of milk bottles on the way to school in the morning from around the mid-40s to mid-50s, it has something to do with why he can’t do that anymore. How his stories of luscious cream in the frosty cold mesh with his other stories of walking 2 miles to school barefoot in the snow with only a hard biscuit for lunch is beyond me, but these are the mysteries of parenthood. I have already assured my ten year old that the tragic deprivation of my childhood makes any complaint she may have for the next 8 years pointless and whiney. Dad taught me well.

I’m not really sure what difference that processing makes. My friends used to have ‘raw milk’. I thought it tasted disgusting. Another friend drinks skim milk. To me this tastes like I imagine lapping up the dregs of my cat’s water dish might. I am a whole milk kinda girl, although I can deal with 2%/1% if I must. Not just whole but even the somewhat intensified milk that Braum’s sells, as they are the dairy slash fast food milk source of my choice. This is because it tastes awesome.

(But to be honest, it’s also because super walmart, in their attempt to sell me 114.7 items I did not intend to shop for, puts the milk literally at the other end of the store away from the front door. They oughtta have quarter mile markers in that store, it’s so big. If it were much bigger, it would cross the state line. I really like milk but I am just not making that much effort for it frankly.) Now that I’m VLC (very low carb) again, milk is out, which since it causes a craving response in me and I’m probably allergic to it in some bizarre way, is for the best.

So ok, dairy products are generally processed but I assume this processing is mostly just making them (a) fit to drink, (b) infused with vitamin D so my programmer / project manager “mole” lifestyle without sun is compensated for, and (c) less likely to kill me from some side effect of industrial dairy cow farming that I had not foreseen. Is it bad that they are processed like that? I don’t know. I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter though. My cream does not come with variants like “non”-homogenized. Is dairy technically a processed food?

Next we move on to the severely processed. Let’s start with my favorite frankenfood: Low Carb Slim Fast drink in the can. 190 calories. 10.5g fat. 4 carbs, 2 fiber carbs, 2ecc, 20g protein. Plus a buncha vitamins. You cannot beat those numbers. After even my super walmart abandoned the LC version in favor of the omnipresent “Optima-reduces appetite!” version (with lowfat and 2g protein?! how does it do that?), I had to order it from Amazon. According to my estimates I need to buy stock in Slim-Fast’s parent company, since a hefty chunk of my limited single-mom income is going toward it for the next 7.2 centuries, which is how long I expect my weight loss to take. No, I am NOT on a slim-fast diet, before anybody keels over with the horror of it. It’s simply that I am trying to eat lots of times a day, I need a ton of protein a day, and I loathe protein powder. I can mix protein powder in with a slimfast and actually get it down my throat though, so it is helpful to have in my daily intake.

Is it bad to drink the stuff? Oddly the LC version has a lot less chemicals on the ingredients list than the other I compared it to some months ago. If it’s the difference between not having a meal (which is my biggest problem: not having food ready in advance, not having time to make it when I’m working, etc.) then I figure it served a noble purpose, despite its processing.

OK now we get to home made stuff.

Let’s say I take some eggs, and some cream, and some ground up flax seeds, and some protein powder, and some cocoa (Penzeys.com 24% high butterfat dutched!), and some sweetener (fiberfit and sweetzfree), and some almond oil, and some hazelnut flour (lower carb than almond flour), and I mix it all together in a bowl and then I bake it, for my cocoa muffins v1.8. The protein powder is very processed. The cream is pastur-homogo-something’d, and I’m sure the cocoa has gone through more processing than Liz Taylor’s face. The flax seeds were ground up. But hey the eggs were pure!

OK so pop quiz: is it healthier for me to eat this that I make in my kitchen, than to eat something with similar ingredients I buy at the store? (No, it doesn’t exist at the store. Humor my example.) Aside from maybe a single preservative ingredient or something, would there really be a difference?

If I am told to “avoid processed foods”, does this mean that my combination of ingredients (ranging from pure to excessively processed), mixed and baked into some chemical conglomerate that even my kid likes (which only proves it’s probably killing us from the inside out, given her other tastes), is a “higher grade, but still processed, food”?

Is it better for me to eat my eggs scrambled, vs. mixed up in a breadish, because they are less processed that way? Or is the fact that my breadishes are composed of protein, flax, nuts, etc. sufficiently redeeming?

Should I feel guilty about having many dozens of liquid flavorings/extracts, nearly three dozen flavors of DaVinci sugarfree syrups, “alternative sugars” in like 9 different forms, NOT/Starch etc. for thickening — all pretty close to totally artificial ingredients? Am I losing dietary brownie points for eating things that were not one with God within the last 48 hours?

I want to quote this great passage from Dr. Michael Eades’ blog about natural vs. well, unnatural, foods:

There is so much hype about the crappiness of the standard American diet crawling with processed foods of every stripe that it is easy to fall victim to the if-it’s-organic-it-must-be-healthful con. Homemade ice cream with organic cream and organic sugar and home grown fruit seems so much more wholesome than store-bought, but your pancreas can’t tell the difference. If you eat it (in large quantities) they will come. ‘They’ being enlarged fat cells and hyperinsulinemia. And ‘they’ come whether it’s ‘organic’ or not. (Again, were I planning on going face down in the ice cream, I would prefer it made with ‘wholesome’ ingredients, but I wouldn’t fool myself that my pancreas wasn’t going to pay the price.)

So theoretically is my Low Carb Slimfast a better choice than frozen corn and peas microwaved? ‘Cause even though the latter are “real food” and “natural,” they’ll kick pancreas butt better than an LC cheesecake will?

Speaking of LC cheesecake, how are they? I don’t know. I’ve made three tiny ones (enough for 2 ramikens) but unfortunately, my hand, the spoon, and my mouth, conspire to eat it out of the Magic Bullet blender cup before it ever gets to the ramikens to bake. I would trade sex for the stuff it’s so good. I haven’t made it in eons because I think I like it too well. There has to be something sinful about anything I feel that passionate about.

Tonight’s food: Godzilla Burgers. A replay on the hamburger mixed with some mustard, worcestershire, oregano, and Gorgonzola crumbled cheese. I’m hoping to make several and freeze a few and fridge a couple. My kid loves these.

Tonight’s experiment: a sweetish that started out called ‘protein powder donut holes’, moved into ‘LC funnel cakes’, sidestepped to another form of ‘waffles’, etc. Most lowcarb recipes like this are actually “concept recipes”, much like the flax bowl muffin or mock danish or pizza quiche, which you can modify like a mad scientist. There is an original, then variant versions, and four pages of raving, at the lowcarber.org forum, link here.

Now there’s that guilt again. “It’s fried!” Maybe I can use coconut oil. Trying to get more calories and fat in my diet anyway and it’s ridiculously hard. It’s dominantly egg, butter, protein powder. If it’s encouraged for me to eat eggs fried in butter, coconut oil in my coffee, and protein powder drinks, is it less healthy for me to eat something vaguely akin to a fried pastry? I mean, if I were putting a little sweetzfree or splenda in my coffee nobody’d comment, so adding it to my fried-thing shouldn’t matter.

Is it like a matter of “the moral of it” — morning coffee, protein drink and eggs are somehow inherently better than all of those ingredients (except the coffee) in a different form? I mean is it just WRONG for me if I were to adopt some recipe (using this one as an example) that is “homemade processed food” and eat that quite a lot, rather than fresh veggies and steak?

I guess my point is that recommendations from others in LC-land sometimes seem a bit contradictory or pollyanna and I’m wondering what “really” matters.

The lowcarb internet world is amazing.

You know, I’ve been on the internet since 1993, pretty much full time plus, not counting that from 1995 till present my job (on TOP of my other time on it) has been internet based. I am as world-weary street-wise a net punk as they come. I can hang in playgrounds that would send most people screaming into the night. Nothing phases me at this point; nothing shocks me.

But the lowcarb internet world has surprised the hell outta me.

I swear, I have never — NEVER, in all these years — encountered a community of people who were, across the board, so GOOD to others, so encouraging, so sharing.

I’ve been in projects that I personally paid thousands and worked years to support and had maybe 12 people out of thousands even bother to be kind let alone say thanks. And yet, in the lowcarb world, the minor effort of my journal and this blog and whatever I might post on lowcarber.org has brought more kind, positive, personal response from people, via email or my lowcarber.org journal or this blog, than I have seen in any other field online in 14 years combined.

People I would have zero in common with outside of “food choice” have shown me more kindness and humanity than plenty of ‘online buddies’ I’ve known for a decade. I don’t mean my buddies are bad to me! I just mean that people in lowcarb are often exceptional. They go above and beyond. I feel like I have met more people worth making friends, “real friends,” thanks to lowcarb than any other source of people.

Despite the debates and social politics on the forums, still you find huge numbers of people being warm and compassionate and supportive on the journals than I’ve ever seen in one place before. I’ve seen support forums. Even for food. But lowcarb seems different. Could it be that unlike other eating plans, lowcarbers may have existing issues with food or emotions or life, but they are not starving and miserable at least, like most lowfat lowcalorie plans? I don’t know what it is. I just marvel at it regularly.

My email address is thedivinelowcarb at gmail dot com by the way. I just realized today that I didn’t have it anywhere on this blog. I guess that would explain why I get so many messages through my lowcarber.org account even though it’s about this blog.

I’ve gotten half a dozen private messages and several on my LC journal, in response to my ‘Hideous Truth’ post. Several of the private messages told me some of their own stories. It’s really amazing what deeply wounding, mortifying things people have to suffer when seriously obese, and the amount of sheer grim determination to get through it they have. I am starting to think that really overweight people may be some of the strongest people around. I think if you plucked the average thin person off the street and gave them the kind of issues the severely obese have, they’d go postal, or show up in ER within a day.

That lowcarb not only seems to congregate so many good people, but seems to be an avenue for genuinely improving (and even saving) their lives, is truly inspiring.

This morning my kid as usual didn’t want to get up and hadn’t picked out her clothes as she’s supposed to and changed her mind twice and was late, late, nagging, reminding, stomping bellowing if you don’t get your butt out here right this minute young lady late, and I really just wanted to say forget it, who cares, school this week (its last week) is nothing but play anyway so why should it matter if you’re there, I’m so tired I just want to go back to bed.

But I acted like it was important to me because everyone knows the minute you become an adult you think school is a deeply valuable experience and punctuality is next to godliness.

I stopped by the store in the morning to get a couple bottles of Diet Mountain Dew. I really needed caffeine in a big way. I didn’t want to get out of the car and go in front of the morning pre-work rush at the local gas-station/store. I hate it when people see me. If I had my way I’d live in a freakin’ cave so I didn’t feel like every human who looked at me got that “oh-my-god-she’s-huge” look in their eyes.

But I went in and shopped and pretended I didn’t care.

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Sometimes, I feel like I spend more time acting-like-something than a professional actor.

Granted, our culture puts us in a place where we must, sometimes; civilization is a thin veneer of let’s-pretend on top of the world of animals we basically are.

But between being massively overweight and being on a lowcarb eating plan, it seems like there are so many more options for pretending.

Recently on the lowcarber.org forum, there was a thread about whether people were “out of the closet” about being on a lowcarb eating plan. The majority of the people (so far) actually said that they didn’t openly say so, and plenty of them suggested a variety of subterfuge, convenient phrasings, and minor sins of omission, they say instead.

Why? Because they got tired of being harrassed, of getting spontaneous, if completely ignorant, over-opinionated dietary advice from everybody, because they didn’t feel like explaining it, because it was easier to just say X and let it be at that, etc. The person who started the thread said something like, “No wonder so many think lowcarb is dead, if most the people on it are in the closet about it!”

They’re just pretending. They’re eating salad and calling it not very hungry. They’re skipping the bread and dessert and calling it “cutting back on sugars and starches.” They’re claiming they’re allergic, they’re hypoglycemic, they’re diabetic, all kinds of things, just to get people to shut up and let it be already.

How much do we pretend? How much is necessary?

I pretend to have energy when I don’t, that’s a constant. Lowcarb helps with that by giving me a massive amount more than I ever have off it. Of course, it’s still not really enough to get someone my size bouncing off the walls, but it’s certainly more than usual.

Today is my official independence day: my husband, as of late last night, is out of the country, and permanently out of my life aside from visits-to-kid. Thanks be to God. I feel like I have lost a ton of weight from some unspecified part of my body, as if we hold some ‘astral’ sense of weight with things that ‘weigh us down’.

I could look at this as losing 195 lbs overnight. I feel great!

It’ll take me at least a month just to clean up the unbelievable amount of STUFF he over-occupied the main room (and largest bedroom) with, but I’ll do it. And after two months of ice and snow, and 8 cats stuck in the house all the time, I decided to get tough about them at the same time. He went to the airport and they got thrown out to live in the garage. It has a couple HAC vents out there, food, water, litterboxes, and a cat-door in the window so they are free to go in/outdoors. I let the little fragile one with no body fat stay inside, but when it warms up, she can go out too.

Already the house FEELS significantly different.

I’m so happy.

I sang, “Hit the ROAD, Jack! And don’tcha come back! No more, no more, no more, no more!” all the way home from the airport.

I think I’ll go clean something.

The last month+ I’ve been doing a lot of reading, thinking, evaluating what I am doing as far as health and fitness goes, and where I want to go from here.

I actually have had so much I wanted to talk about that I just didn’t know how to condense it from novel-length to blog post length. I probably can’t.

I think what I should do, is go through my mental process over the last month+, so y’all are on the same page with me.

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I admit that when I began on a lowcarb eating plan, I didn’t have much in mind at first except “surviving.” I didn’t think I’d live another year (or even quarter) if I didn’t do something immediately. So anything that made me able to move a little better, breathe a little better, feel a better, was what I should be doing. Lowcarb is ideal in that situation. It has such a fast water/glycol loss right off the top, that a person almost instantly has more energy, feels more limber, just what you need for finding hope for your future, finding the energy to keep-on keeping-on, finding the courage to hope that maybe something can change.

The initial weight loss following that part is probably as much lean body mass as fat, as there do seem to be limits on the speed of fat loss without lean loss, and initial lowcarb done at a high weight exceeds that by several orders of magnitude. But for most of us that is trivia: getting enough weight off fast enough that the imminent threat of keeling over is reduced, long enough to let us do something more medium-term proactive about our health, has to be the focus.

Once I began losing weight, I told myself that when I had lost 100 lbs, I would re-consider whatever I was doing, and do something about exercise. I knew that rapid weight loss, especially without major exercise, wasn’t ideal. Or in the words of Richard Atkins, “Exercise is non-negotiable.” But when I first began lowcarb, I could barely step up on a curb. I couldn’t even stand, let alone walk, for more than 30 seconds without exhaustion and back pain. So it had to wait until I’d lost enough weight to be able to move decently.

As I neared the 100# mark, I began to be a little more aware of my body and what it could do than I used to be. On one hand, my increased energy, flexibility, and ability to MOVE, had improved my life in so many ways. On the other hand, I kept feeling that I was losing strength. One day, for 2-3 days, I would be able to do some new thing I hadn’t been able to do before, such as nimbly bounce up my porch steps with no handrail, no two-feet-per-step, no groaning major effort on the top step (which is higher than the others). Then suddenly it would be so much harder, if not impossible. At first would think, “Maybe I’m a little low in protein or something,” or, “Well everyone has stronger or weaker days,” but protein and water didn’t seem to change it. I began to feel like I was constantly encountering a two-part event: first I would lose a little more weight, feel a little better, get a little stronger; then I would get a little weaker, feel a little less energetic… though the scale would show I’d lost a little more weight. I started developing this superstition of sorts that I was losing muscle. That my rapid weight loss combined with no serious exercise to speak of, was gradually wearing away my lean body mass. I couldn’t think of anything else that would explain why most all the gains I seemed to make in strength, were promptly reversed.

Just over a month ago, I increased my protein, without increase of calories or carbs. Instantly, I started gradually — literally daily — gaining weight. This didn’t bother me really, because I felt better rather than worse, and even while this was happening, my rings were falling off my smaller hand, so I put them on the other, and then they were falling off the other hand–it was clear I was reducing. What I suspected was that I had some wasted but not fully gone muscle, which the added protein was salvaging. This contributed to my suspicion that maybe I really was losing lean body mass, and needed to do something about the exercise issue.

So I thought about it really hard. Heh. How many calories does thought burn?

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Right at the 100# mark, things started changing. I wonder if part of this is subconscious, because I had such focus on that number. First, the weight loss slowed greatly and then stopped, although I had not done anything differently. I’d thought perhaps certain things I was eating (such as flax muffins) might relate, so cut them out, but it didn’t seem to matter. Now, for many many years I have maintained and gained weight on only a fraction of the calories my BMR allegedly needs. So I know my body; I know it adapts quickly to some homeostasis that will maintain me, and that is my doom.

For over a month now, my weight has varied. I am unable to see any real pattern in it that would tell me it was water, PMS, protein or whatever. For the first time since starting lowcarb, I have felt sort of removed from the scale, as if I can no longer track how I feel against the numbers it shows me. For my blog I wait until the weight settles so I feel it’s consistent, then I post the new weight and an updated history of the scale. So far it hasn’t settled, wandering around a 20# variance in a way that is pretty confusing.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have weighed and measured. I currently weigh more than I did a month ago (though like I said, it varies). But here’s the interesting thing: All of my measurements have continued to go down. So even though my weight has slightly increased, the size of my body has consistently been DEcreasing. For example, from January 8 to January 18, I gained four pounds. But I lost an inch on my hips, 3/4 inch on my waist, 1.5 inch on my upper thigh, 1.75 inch on my calve. (I didn’t measure other parts.) So… even though it seems like I am gaining weight and that should frighten me, I’m getting smaller and that delights me. Doing both at the same time does seem a little weird, I admit.

But I think this is where body composition comes into the picture. (Meaning, how much of your body is fat vs. anything else.) I saw this photo recently (how I wish I could find it again to show you) that a woman posted, a before and after picture. She was doing weight training and cardio workouts between the time of the two pictures. In one, she is vastly thinner, firmer, stronger, obviously more healthy, very impressive. The difference on the scale? Three pounds. That’s it. Because she was gaining muscle and losing fat (more back & forth than simultaneously), the scale barely changed at all. Her body certainly did though! It sort of emphasized to me that my focus on scale-weight is shortsighted. If I am losing muscle, that’s nothing to be proud of. That’s a bad thing, not a good thing. I should be focused on my body fat %, at least to the degree I can estimate such things, not on the scale. Losing lean mass reduces metabolism, slows weight loss, decreases energy and strength, and in general is the last thing I should want to do.

Ironically, I believe that most people who get really really fat, as I did, actually start the process with exactly this. If you don’t eat enough calories, the metabolism slows down to match that. If you don’t eat often enough, the body slows down metabolism to deal with perceived starvation. Without enough protein, the lean body mass decreases, further reducing metabolism. The thyroid output reduces and further slows your metabolic rate. Then, even eating the same too-small number of calories a day can cause weight gain rather than maintenance, as impossible as the numbers make that seem. Then eat your food in one meal, and you’re sure to over-carb and over-calorie, storing more fat daily even if you’re eating half your BMR in calories, because you can’t burn it all off in one sitting. (Eating right before bed, as I did, is the worst.) Add to that stress, sleep deprivation, nutritional deficiencies, food allergens, and a variety of other issues known to impact metabolism, and weight loss/gain, and you have a perfect setup for gradually but consistently adding a LOT of weight to a body. One thing is sure: I may be no expert on weight loss, but I am certainly a master at weight gain.

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So in January, I took some extra time to read a ton of archives of the lowcarber forum, and a couple others on that topic, encountering en-masse the personal stories of lowcarbers dating back years sometimes. When you read something all at once like this, you tend to be a lot more impacted by what seem to be “trends” than you would otherwise; you probably wouldn’t even notice certain things otherwise, not without someone running statistics for you. But the “mega-dose” of reading a bulk of something all at once, will bring to your attention repeating elements. Some of the repeating elements were things that really bothered me; worried me, made me feel like there were some problems that were clearly common in our lowcarb world and yet, nobody really seemed to be dealing with them openly. It is as if lowcarb was this philosophy, we were all in it together, and it would be sacrilege to point out something that was a problem, even though pointing it out is no diss on LC at all!, just an observation of something that obviously needs tweaking or further consideration.

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1. People regularly complained of long stalls. I don’t mean long like a month. I mean long like 4-18 months. In the lowcarb world, the response amounted to what I would dryly compare to, “Just have faith.” Well, I have faith in God, but I don’t have faith in stalls. Lowcarb is not a religion. (Although to hear some forum discussions, you might be surprised!) As the saying I like best goes, “If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else.” If they were not losing weight but they were losing size or constantly feeling better, that would not really be a stall. A stall is where nothing particularly useful is happening. Why anybody would put up with this for more than a month, two at the most, without taking proactive steps to change something, is beyond me.

My cousin, a former natural bodybuilder, he and I sometimes talked about fat loss and so on, and I couldn’t even imagine someone like him simply sitting around waiting for months and months for something to change. I realized that this was what it came down to. Bodybuilders wouldn’t. Dieters would. It’s like a different philosophy. As if dieters feel less deserving, or more sadly resigned to some fate of ‘unfair and illogical body situations’ so they just stoically accept this, as if it were the will of God or something. Bodybuilders don’t have that kind of fatalistic crap in their mindset, and they are likely to change their approach weekly based on measurements and evaluating what didn’t work the previous week — two, at the most.

To me, it seemed like there was some inflexibility in the lowcarber world in general, like, “Lowcarb is the answer, and even when it appears the question has changed.” I saw that many people went off lowcarb during long stalls, I’m sure in part because it would be damned demoralizing. But the real issue to me, beyond the lack of flexibility, beyond the rather surreal pollyanic ‘faith’ approach to it all, was the fact that the stalls happened AT ALL. This suggested a larger issue:

The body is marvelously adaptible. Eat fewer calories, it will reduce your metabolism to match. (It will also reduce your thyroid’s T3 output, which also reduces metabolism.) Eat infrequently, it will reduce your metabolism to match. Exercise or be sedentary, it will increase or reduce your metabolism to match. So it struck me to wonder: if you eat lowcarb, will it gradually reduce your metabolism? Will the body “adapt” to lowcarb, just like it adapts to anything else? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed unreasonable to expect that it wouldn’t, given it reacts and adapts to everything else we do.

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2. The number of people who went off lowcarb eventually, and regained weight, seemed to be right in the same 95 percentile as every other ‘diet plan’. Now, I know, sing it with me sistahs, “It’s not a diet, it’s an eating plan for life!” Yeah. I’m sure Weight Watchers people say the same thing. As I like to say, no eating plan works for you if you aren’t on it. The reality is that for nearly everybody with rare exceptions, eating lowcarb can be a real pain in the butt, especially for people who are not used to making time and effort for cooking and planning ahead. Yet it disturbed me to think that it was apparently so difficult that the number of long term lowcarbers would seem to be so low compared to ‘all the others’ who had never returned, or who had returned having gained back the weight and then more.

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3. Another thing that bothered me is that the weight gain was so insanely rapid for people. I mean, although my initial weight gain was fast, it took me 15 years to gain the rest of it. Most people, it takes them quite awhile to get to whatever ‘high point’ they’ve got. The weight gain when someone went off lowcarb was far more rapid than the initial, pre-lowcarb weight gain most folks had put that much on with. This again suggested to me that maybe the body was adapting to lowcarb, just like it does to low-calorie, so that the metabolism adjusted to it and when people changed their approach, the fat would just pile on.

Everything that seemed to be the biggest problems, that I noticed the most when reading tons of lowcarber journals and discussion in bulk, seemed to point to the same likely scenario: the body adapted to lowcarb, and nobody seemed to be doing anything about this, to prevent it or change or even recognize it.

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4. In all the famous lowcarb books, in all the lowcarb “Philosophy,” there is a heaven for good behavior. What I mean is, allegedly once you have lost whatever weight you had to lose on lowcarb, then you would gradually increase your carbs. Atkins has meals with so many carbs I’d need a week to eat them. The Drs. Eades as well. The idea was that once you didn’t want to actively lose weight anymore, you could increase your carbs to anywhere from 55-150 a day, depending on the person. This sounds really good on paper. It sounds logical, like, you reduce carbs real low and lose weight, and then bring them up until you are simply maintaining. It all makes perfect sense, right?

Except in the real world that I see on the lowcarb forums, this almost never happens–at least, not to anybody who has lost a significant amount of weight. (I really don’t take the small losses as an example as they don’t have to lowcarb long enough for that.) First, people often take so insanely long to lose the last 20 lbs that it becomes a lifetime probject. Second, even when people reach their goals, and they are in ‘maintenance’, I read what they say, what they eat daily, what their issues are, and it is almost unanimous: if they spent over six months (or especially over a year) losing their weight on 30 carbs a day, that’s it. If they eat more than around 30 carbs a day, they start gaining weight.

So that promised nirvana of “increasing carbs so you could eat more like normal people, or at least not stress about spices and sauces,” might look good on paper, but it almost never works in real life. The reality seems to be that long-term lowcarbers’ bodies adapt to the carb intake and from that point on, increasing that intake causes weight gain. So in reality, induction was not just a two week thing. It was the way people had to eat almost for life. No wonder most people can’t do it indefinitely. Nobody including Atkins himself ever expected people to live on that indefinitely. But the choice becomes to do so, or to gain back the weight.

Again, it all seemed to come down to: the body adapts. People get fat in part because of that adaptation. They begin losing weight on lowcarb, but eventually, whether during the weight loss or not long after it (maybe depending on how long it takes, how rapid the loss, etc.), the adaptation factor kicks in. (The fact that many lowcarbers not only ate the same general nutrient-counts per day, but often even the same food every day, seemed to me like it would only increase the adaptation tendency.)

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So what are we doing about it? I thought and thought about this. I finally decided that “logically,” if the body’s adapting was the trouble spot, then maybe one needed to vary the number of carbs they ate once in awhile, so the body wouldn’t do that. Has anybody else ever thought of this, I wondered? Surely I can’t be the first person to notice this phenomenon, no matter how utterly silent and oblivious the lowcarb world at large online seems to be!

So I went to google and I typed in “carbohydrate variation” to see what would come up.

Bingo. I got about a million bodybuilding websites and bodybuilder blog posts as a result.

So I went to about a dozen of them that looked interesting, and I read the articles, and I read the message boards. Carbohydrate variation is also known as “carb cycling.” Carb cycling has a variety of approaches and plans for it, each of which have their own name or acronym. In all of them, the message was the same, though:

The body adapts to anything done consistently. Carbohydrates, calories, and fat, if eaten at the same amount consistently, will cause ‘adaptation’ of the body, so it no longer is ‘reacting’ to something like a reduction. If you do things consistently, you have to reduce further and further to get results (by results I mean “change”), until it is unhealthy, and it is reducing metabolism from the start when you do so. Eventually you will be nearly starving and still not losing weight — or even gaining it.

Well I’ve been down THAT road. I ‘adapted’ my body into severe obesity once already. I don’t have any desire to adapt my body to yet-something-else. My poor body has enough issues to overcome without adding yet one more.

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When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. When you first make a “change” in your eating plan, your body “reacts to the change.” Such as: it loses weight, or it gains weight, it loses fat, or it gains muscle, or whatever follows the change you made.

Once you do that thing consistently, though, it is no longer a ‘change’. The body is no longer ‘reacting’. There is a limited amount of time for body ‘reaction’ before it adapts and finds its balance with the new approach.

So, weight loss slows down. Or even stops. Stalls. Metabolism reduces to match whatever you have reduced on the intake-side.

It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.

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One of the things I discovered when reading extensively about how bodybuilders did “low carb,” is that the Atkins-Eades-etc. version of lowcarb is probably a misnomer. In the larger world, about 70-120 carbs a day is considered lowcarb. 40-70/80 carbs a day is considered VERY lowcarb. So as you might imagine, those of us eating 10-40 carbs a day are “ultra” or “severely” lowcarb on that scale. I hadn’t realized that the average carb intake was hundreds a day — and hence, how “radical” my eating plan was.

I had not before considered that my eating plan was “extreme.” To me, high-carb/low-fat did not work for me, so lowcarb was simply what did. I started thinking more about the overall question of lowcarb.

First, the lowcarb approach done anything but briefly (such as bodybuilders do, to lose water prior to competitions), does seem to build in the assumption that everybody on it, maybe everybody period, has some profound metabolic problem with carbohydrates. Now I always assumed I did, once I discovered lowcarb worked for me; I thought that its working for me was the proof that I did. But it turns out, it works for most people. (Not everybody.) That doesn’t imply a carb metabolism problem; it’s just basic biochemistry. Now sure, getting really fat can really screw up a lot of things with your body and metabolism, you can become much more sensitive to blood sugar spikes, more insulin resistant, and the overabundance of fat itself has all kinds of chemical effects that slow metabolism in more than one way. But still, that does not prove that one has some terrible, incurable carbohydrate metabolic problem.

I began wondering if maybe one reason I was so quick to accept that idea, was simply because I was fat. You see, it is obvious if someone weighs so much it’s obvious they have a metabolic problem; as my brother used to say, “No shit, Sherlock!” But all of this time, I have held the belief that this is something that somewhere between genetics and circumstance, fell out of the sky on me. Wasn’t my fault, my doing, my responsibility. It was a curse, and I lived with it, that’s all. “Anybody else with this kind of metabolism would be the same way.”

Well I got thinking a lot more about this, and doing a lot of soul searching. Eventually, I had to conclude that I have been a bit lazy and a bit too quick to accept an excuse. When I look back on my life, particularly my initial massive weight gain in my early 20’s, what I see is that I did just about every imaginable thing that a person could do to gain weight. I ate once a day. I ate right before bed. I ate carbs due to hunger. I ate insufficient protein. I was incredibly sedentary — busy as hell but all in sit-down things. I was massively stressed out. I was chronically sleep deprived. I was nutritionally deficient. In short, I did every single thing that a person needs to do, to gain weight. Lots of it. Fast. And to reduce metabolism. Fast. And to doom my future metabolism to something pretty dysfunctional. Fast. And it worked.

But if my metabolism is currently less than ideal, it is not because I am helpless to some metabolic disorder. I created my own metabolic disorder. In ignorance, true. Under the influence of a system that keeps telling people to eat less to lose weight, true. But so what. The point is, just because the high-carb/low-fat typical medical approach, which probably works for a few people but fails dismally for me, is not workable for weight loss in my case, and just because severe-lowcarb IS workable for weight loss in my case, doesn’t mean there is nothing in between.

Severe exclusion of any major nutrient-source doesn’t really seem that reasonable when you back off the LC belief system for awhile. Reduction, sure! Even low amounts, sure. But when it reaches the zone that everyone on earth but the few in that clique considers “extreme,” maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at things, without the near-religious bias of “my way is the right way!” woven into it. It may be right, or at least ok, but does that mean it’s the *only* way?

When I further considered the issue of body adaptation, I realized that if you start very low carb, there isn’t far to go. If one is to have any kind of a cycling plan that goes sometimes lower and sometimes higher — by significant enough amounts to matter, mind you — you would have to start at a somewhat higher level, so you were in the middle to begin with.

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Of course, the problem with the ‘near-eternal induction’ level plan that most severely obese people are on, just due to the amount of weight they have to lose, is that it effectively resets what your body is adapted to. To begin with, we probably could have eaten 60 carbs a day, mostly in veggies and some dairy, and “gradually” gone into a mild ketogenic state, and lost body fat instead of body fat + lean mass. Now, however, eat more than 35 carbs a day, and I fall out of ketosis, because my body is used to eating 20-30 carbs a day on average.

So, if I had known all this to begin with, I might have begun the eating plan differently. But I didn’t. Yet, I do not regret the last four months at all.

But now I believe that:

1. I think I have been eating too few calories. I think this is part of what is behind my lean body mass loss. People say, “You have to eat at least 1200 calories!” Could we please, as a whole lowcarb field, get a clue? People who are 300# or more need to eat MORE than that. MUCH more. They take advice just like others do and when the advice says something like that, they buy it. They need more. And this means that, unless you eat a cow and two chickens a day, they are going to need to eat a few more carbs as well, to make it more easily possible. Severely overweight people who are not already over-adapted to severely lowcarb, are going to go ketogenic usually at higher carb counts than thin people anyway, so this shouldn’t be a big deal. If someone still wants to do a hard induction, fine, but it really should be limited to two weeks. I would no longer recommend to people that they ’stay on induction until their weight is lost’. It’s going to take years to lose the weight when you start hundreds of pounds into obesity, staying on induction all that time isn’t even healthy, not only because the body’s going to adapt to that severe lack of carbs–something none of the carb experts ever talk about but I see literally *everywhere* so I consider this a rather fundamental flaw in the presentation of this eating plan–but because the carb count doesn’t allow enough sheer food and different foods (for nutrient variance) (and no, vitamins aren’t a replacement for food except for very brief periods where there is little option).

2. I think I have been eating too seldom. The body does not, cannot, store protein, though it can store most other things. About 3 hours after you have eaten, whatever protein you ingested is gone, digested. The body constantly needs protein. So every time you eat farther apart than three hours, let’s say it is 5 hours between your meals, your body just spent two hours feeding off your lean body mass. Even when you sleep it does this. I believe eating literally every 3 hours, like bodybuilders do, would have a huge benefit to everyone but especially to the severely obese, because it would help them eat as much as they needed to per day (it isn’t easy), and it pretty much kills hunger even when one is not in ketosis, and because in my observation, a lot of severely overweight people have more of a problem with NOT eating enough (and then later, being driven by the body’s starvation response to binge) than eating too often.

3. I think I have been eating too few carbs. I know, the experts say that “zero carb is fine because nobody needs carbohydrates.” I shudder when I see the effect this has on people who really work out hard but are still trying to live on 10-20 carbs a day to do it, because their body adapted to that during their weight loss. I will not argue that on some grander physiological perspective, nobody “needs” carbs “since you can live off your own body.” (People doing weight training should not *want* to live off their own bodies — particularly at the weight training point when the muscle is screaming for nutrients — does it help to break down muscle (or starve it) to feed muscle?!) I only question whether it is necessary. I do not live in a cave, I live in Oklahoma, and trying to be “severely” lowcarb in America is like trying to be Amish in New York. It’s possible, but it’s almost ridiculous how much trouble it is. Can I do it if I must? Certainly. Must I? It is that I’m not sure about. I got the idea that because a severe eating approach worked, that must be what I needed. I think that is a leap to conclusion not supported by any real evidence. It is entirely possible that a more balanced eating plan, which as a side effect would make long-term staying on it and social-integration a whole lot easier, might work just as well for me. Would I lose 100# in four months? No. But I don’t believe more than 1/3 that at the most was actual “fat” (vs. water, glycol and lean mass) anyway, so that really shouldn’t matter, since I don’t want to be losing any more of that if I can help it.

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So after a great deal of thought and evaluation, after considering a variety of other eating plans that involved carb cycling, and even calorie and/or fat cycling as well, after reading several plans that I thought were well thought out (such as ‘burnthefat.com’ — although I am not against dietary fat especially saturated fat like the author is, aside from that I generally think his approach is very well thought out) — I finally decided that, just like my original low carb plan that I made up myself, now, I am going to go on my own eating and fitness plan.

It took a lot of reading, thinking and tweaking before I came up with something. I started with something that was geared to ‘repair metabolism’, with nutrient ratios and so on. It was such a pain in the butt to try and get counts right for with food that I finally threw up my hands and decided to take a different approach entirely. I will post my new eating plan — which I have not begun, though I was supposed to begin last week! — as the next blog post.

As a last note, most of the research there is about lowcarb, is not super long term — I mean, it’s not severely obese people on induction or near-induction level carbs for long periods being looked at. I believe some of the issues I’ve talked about here, like the need for variation in carb intake to prevent body adaptation, simply don’t get run into with the average study. Maybe this is why there isn’t more about it in the common literature. I mean it’s all over health and fitness authors who include moderate to low carb, but I don’t even remember seeing it in the ultra-low carb authors’ books. This isn’t anything new, or novel (at all). It’s just not normally an issue in the lowcarb world, and maybe part of that is because most people are trying to lose 20-60 pounds, not 100++.

A new experience is making such a big difference for me:

Organization.

(Heh. I bet you thought this was about something else.)

I’ve had a real challenge while on low carb, especially the last 2 months, with a variety of factors, including:

How many of us work our butts off for someone else, but… only “hope to get around to” the things we want to do?

* remembering to eat
* remembering to weigh myself
* remembering to take my supplements at all, let alone 3x a day
* being able to drink water consistently through the day so that I can get a gallon in by the end of the day
* not eating frequently enough (rather than only once or twice a day, or meals separated by 6 hours)
* not preparing properly so when I go to eat, there is something lowcarb available that does not take me 30 minutes to pull together (if at all)

…All of which combines to other side effects, like not getting nearly enough protein each day, and more.

Yeah I know. After reading that you’re thinking, “You can’t remember to eat?! You have no brain!”

Yes, there is that…

But seriously, I wake up in the morning and I’m into the “get kid to school mode” and then I move on to the “I work from home mode” and that’s that. I’m used to putting the kid, the job, in fact everything, before “me” on my priority list.

I’m very focused. When I’m doing thing X, I am totally doing it. I’m busy, and I don’t remember to do stuff until usually late afternoon, when I realized I’ve blown it yet again — I didn’t eat frequently, I didn’t drink water, weigh myself, take supplements, get stuff ready that I needed, etc. 15+ years of eating one meal a day and tuning out the world while I obsessed on work is a hard habit to break.

How many people are unusually competent as mothers or church planners or business people but feel like they’re constantly a day late, a dollar short, and behind the 8-ball in their personal life?

So my friend was telling me, “Set your alarm!” and I said well then I’d have to reset it a zillion times a day. I heard myself say that and thought to myself, “My gosh, am I the laziest human alive?! You know, I think I might be!” Talk about making excuses. But it got me thinking about it.

I had prepared a ton of chili verde, in the fridge and the freezer, in those little Glad plastic 4oz (1/2 cup) containers. I had baked some Cocoa Muffincakes v1.8 which began a healthy muffin and turned into a sweet treat by the time I was done with it. So for the first time in awhile, I had actually prepared food in advance that I could eat as needed. Plus I have a variety of stuff right now that I could munch on if I chose.

So the day BEFORE today, I sat down, considering what I had in my fridge and pre-pared, and worked out what I should eat today that would bring my nutrition numbers to my ideal.

Why did I never think of doing this before? Planning my food in advance? As if I have to be so undisciplined that I require spontaneity for food or something, how silly — it’s not like I don’t know what I like. (Surely, until recently, humans were usually very carefully planning food in advance and/or eating whatever had to be eaten before it spoiled.)

I put the info in my spreadsheet that I use as a food journal, with set times. Every so many minutes or hours, I was due to do something, usually combined with eating. I would eat X, or Y; I would weigh myself; and I made a point that each time I needed to eat, I would grab my 1/2 gallon water bottle, drink 8 long gulps, and then go do whatever I was doing. After I finished eating I would try to drink 8-16 more gulps, which when you are eating meat is not that hard because it makes you thirsty.

I set my alarm. And when it went off I would instantly re-set it for the next time (90 minutes later), do my thing, and come back to work. It didn’t take hardly any time, contrary to my expectation that getting up so many times a day would be too time consuming.

The result is:

* Today was by far my most ideal nutrition counts in the four months I’ve been lowcarbing.
* I drank a full gallon of water today and never did I really feel like I was waterlogging myself, because it was very gradual and consistent.
* I had many separate eating times of very small amounts throughout the day. I never felt hungry, I never felt full. The more protein your weight requires you get in, the more you need multiple meals, since taking massive protein/fat in one meal isn’t really ideal.
* Since my food’s planned ahead I never reached the middle of a prep only to discover we are now out of something I need, or it has gone bad.
* I got far more movement in my day since I had to get up every 90 minutes.
* I went to the bathroom every 90 minutes (remember that gallon of water!) but it wasn’t like being ‘constantly interrupted’ for it, because I was already up doing my thing anyway, so it just became a routine.
* I actually felt like I was accomplishing something!

Now attach praying, stretching, weighing, taking vitamins, etc. to some of those ‘timed events’ and you have a very constructive day.

I knew it was going to be a successful day. How could it not be? I had a plan!

And importantly, it’s never much. It’s never like some gigantic effort, like making a big meal or doing an hour of exercise or drinking a whole quart of water or something else that’s a real pain no fun. Every 90 minutes, I drop what I’m doing and do what I should — and it usually doesn’t take longer than 5-10 minutes max. And by the end of the day, I find that I have accomplished a LOT — all in tiny little pieces.

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Meanwhile, I actually made nearly 200g of protein today, a full gallon of water, at 20 carbs and 2200 calories — and everything I ate was fabulous. I wasn’t stressed or rushing. I wasn’t trying to do math in my head and guess about my food or ‘forage’ in a hurry for lunch. I got my prayers and stretching and other things taken care of. And from the beginning of my day, here’s the kicker:

I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO BE A SUCCESSFUL DAY.

How could it not be? I had a plan!
I had everything all worked out ahead of time.

It was easy, it was fast, and it got done.

Think about it. We plan our work days, our meetings, our lesson plans, our grocery lists. Those of us who do jobs like project management for a living, plan the ‘flow’ of things so there are no surprises (we hope), no panicking rush, no running out of resources, no bottleneck vs. desert of workflow for vendors and contractors, etc. We plan it, we document it, we report on it.

Funny most of us don’t put as much “Organization” into the rest of our lives, isn’t it? Why NOT pre-plan and schedule your food/water and minor activities? It’s not like you can’t change your mind if you need to. Isn’t LIFE at least as important as the job? Isn’t being competent and feeling good about what we accomplish in many areas just as important personally as professionally?

I’m used to putting the kid, the job, in fact everything, before “me” on my priority list.

Why not “get my act together” by sitting down and making a plan for shopping, for pre-cooking/storing, eating, and all the little things I must do? Why not set an alarm or organizer-reminder so that we get it all done regularly, unhurriedly, gradually — and perfectly?

Many years ago in Los Angeles as an independent contractor (troubleshooting, mfg. line process, software training, etc.) my business card said, “Organizing Your Organization.” Why not organize my own life? How many of us work our butts off for someone else, but then for ourselves, only “hope to get around to” the things we want to do?

How many people are unusually competent as mothers or church planners or business people but feel like they’re constantly a day late, a dollar short, and behind the 8-ball in their personal life? Maybe it’s because we aren’t used to making the same kind of effort on behalf of ourselves that we do for others.

The Big O is now underway. I’m making plans. I’m following plans. And it’s pretty amazing, frankly, how with a minimum of effort, I am accomplishing more than ever.