Checking in

I haven't posted anything since Sunday because my job is consuming me lately. I'm slightly stressed at work. I still love where I work and love my job, but sometimes I get myself in situations with deadlines. There's always a deadline looming up ahead, and I'm always trying to meet it. I have one next week that I'm struggling to meet. I guess that's just life.

I'm doing okay, managing to get to the gym every day, although I took today off because I couldn't remember the last time I missed a day at the gym.

Sometimes I'm getting in a lunch hour walk with a friend at work that practically race walks, I almost can't keep up with her. I think it would be easier if we just ran. Of course we only walk when it's not raining in the third most miserable city in the nation. At least that's according to this article in the Wall Street Journal, although they say it has nothing to do with the weather (really?).

It's funny because my niece was here a couple weeks ago (from Fairbanks, Alaska) and she couldn't get over the deep green of everything, from he grass to the trees. She kept saying how beautiful it looked. She's right, at least when the sun shines here I think this area must be one of the most beautiful places on the planet. If only the sun would shine a little more.

My eating hasn't been perfect, but I'm tracking my food which is big improvement. My food choices have been excellent, but sometimes my portions are too large (four ounces of chicken breast just doesn't do it for me). I've also managed to avoid eating added sugar for the last two weeks, which is huge for me.

When my weight got up to 187 a couple weeks ago I had bought some cookies and other sweets which I consumed over a two-day period. I didn't write about it because I was pretty freaked out. I feel like I have that under control again.

I also stopped buying and eating the Weight Watcher frozen treats. The only "treat" in my freezer are the sugar-free fudge bars that Dawn convinced me to try, and they're not that bad. However, they're not that good either so there's no chance I'd eat a whole box.

Lately my evening snack has been a cup of Greek yogurt with a cup of frozen fruit, and some Stevia. It's more calories than one of the Weight Watcher ice cream bars (about 200 for the yogurt & fruit), but it's the same PointsPlus (3). It's a lot more filling than the bars and sort of like ice cream, and I never go back for seconds (or thirds like I did with the ice cream bars) because it's a lot of food.

I tried the Simply Filling a few days this week and then switched back to PointsPlus on Weight Watchers. You're not suppose to switch mid-week, but I still can't trust myself with the "eating until satisfied" idea.

This is a pretty boring post, but I just can't think of anything interesting to say. I guess all work and no play makes Diana a very dull girl.

Off to work now!

It's hard to lose weight but it's even harder to be fat

As I struggle to get control of my eating and get my weight back down, I constantly wonder why this has to be so incredibly difficult. I know I'm not alone in these feelings. Almost everyone with a weight problem can relate. It's hard to constantly deprive myself of things I want to eat. For whatever reason, food makes me happy. It's just that simple.

Three years ago I was 240 pounds. I honestly don't know how I was walking around. I don't know how I held a job or how I managed to start going to the gym. Carrying around an extra hundred pounds on my body made life very hard.

Two summers ago I was 152, last summer I was around 166. Right now I'm at 182.2. Down 5.2 pounds from my last weigh-in on Wednesday. I'm still 30 pounds up from my lowest weight in the last three years. I've beaten myself up about this over and over. 

The biggest thing I've noticed about this recent weight gain is how uncomfortable I feel in my own skin. More than anything, I'm embarrassed about the weight gain. How could I let this happen to me? Don't I even like myself? The answers to those two questions are sad. I let this happen to me because I don't care enough about myself to want to take care of myself. Like myself? Silly girl, of course not.

Added to the embarrassment is the discomfort. My clothes don't fit. Everything is tight. Every morning looking for something to wear is a challenge. 

Added to the embarrassment and discomfort is the constant nagging fear that I'm going to end up where I started. Every morning I wake up and my first thoughts are "what did I eat last night?".  If the answer is "nothing bad" then I'm happy. If the answer is "oh darn, I ate that entire box of Weight Watcher Truffle bars" then I'm miserable (that was my thought this morning). 

My workouts the last two weeks have been hard. The more weight I gain, the harder it is to exercise. My body doesn't want to work hard, it just wants to lie down and sleep. Every day I push myself to exercise, but with the added weight on my body, I can really feel the difference. It hurts so much more to exercise at this heavier weight.

The bottom line is that it's really harder to be fat than it is to lose weight. Fat hinders my entire life. Being uncomfortable 100% of the time and hating myself because I'm fat is really no way to live.

Some thoughts on fat identity

I've been mostly reading the intarwebs brouhaha over the girl who's a size 6 and had her pic posted on Fuck Yeah Chubby Girls. Personally, I don't think she's chubby, fat, or anything in-between. I think she's a thin to average-sized young girl with just a bit of belly pooch. I think it's awesome that she's learned to love herself/her body in spite of the messages our society sends girls/women about how they should look/dress/act/etc. But I can totally understand where she's coming from.
Now, before y'all start flaming me - understand where I'm coming from as a DEATHFATZ woman who, when I look back at pictures of me as a kid/teenager, wasn't really fat back then but sure as hell thought I was because that's all I heard. Sure, I never wore single digit sizes in my life (well, maybe as a baby and a toddler), and I don't remember ever wearing a size that wasn't classified as "Chubby" in girls' sizes or ever getting to wear any of the clothes like my peers wore when I was teen (I had to shop in the womens' sections of the stores to find anything over size 14/16 to fit me). But I wasn't fat like I'm fat now. If I had tried to join FA back in the 70s, at my then size of 14/16, I'd probably have been laughed right out the door. I didn't have trouble finding clothes to fit, I didn't have to worry about fitting in seats, I didn't have to worry about being mooed at or having things thrown at me for riding my bike in public or roller skating or anything else I did. Thin privilege - I had it and didn't know it because I had been told all my life that I was fat because I didn't wear single-digit sizes and wasn't petite (hard to be petite when you're 5' 9" at 15 years old).
Then life happened and things happened and diets/diet drugs/WLS happened, and I got fat, fatter, fattest. I learned to deal with it, developed a fuck-you attitude in spite of the hurt I felt at the judgmental behavior of asshats/douchecanoes who called me names, didn't want to hire me, didn't want to date me, didn't want to be my friend, didn't want to (insert whatever activity) simply because I was fat. I decided that if people were going to judge me on looks alone, then I didn't need them in my life and they could eat shit and bark at the moon (to steal a phrase from my husband).
Then I found FA and what an eye-opener that was. But ya know what? There were some people in FA that thought I didn't belong in FA at all because I had had WLS years before I even fucking knew what FA was. Even though that WLS failed and I ended up fatter than I was before the surgery, even though I'm adamantly against WLS. They still thought I didn't belong. Guess what? I'm a bitch and I don't get run out of places I want to be all that easily. There were also some people who were very supportive, and I just figured, "Ya know what, fuck the ones who think I don't belong. They don't know me yet, they may not like me once they get to know me, and that's okay. They can do their thing, I'll do my thing, and we'll ignore each other. If they don't ignore me, then I'll tell them to fuck off, no skin off my nose if it pisses them off." I started my own blog, did my own little thing, commented here and there, and life went on. I've made a place for myself in FA, in spite of the ones who thought I didn't belong, and life went on.
The other thing I was thinking about on this topic was how my now ex-daughter-in-law always used to say she was fat. Now, when I first met Tina, she was not fat by any means (not at 5' 11" and 135 lbs). And I told her so, forcefully, many times. She used to really piss me off when she would piss and moan about how fat she was and how she needed to lose 10 or 20 lbs (her nickname among my son's friends was Stick Stickley). What I didn't know at the time was that she had been called fat as a kid by her parents, sisters, and brothers. Now, I haven't seen pictures of her when she was a kid/teenager, so I don't know if she was actually fat or not, but I know what it's like to be called fat when you aren't really fat, but are just taller/bigger than other kids your age. The funny thing is, she could benefit from FA because she's actually fat now - she has MS and lupus and one of the side effects of her drug regimen is weight gain. She's really upset about it, and has been talking about getting a lapband so she can lose weight. I don't know how many times I've told her that when weight gain is a side effect of the drugs you're taking, no diet or WLS is going to make you lose weight and keep it off forever (not that diets and WLS work for permanent weight loss anyway, but still....). I told her that if she gets a lapband, what she's going to lose isn't fat, but will be muscle mass, and with MS that's not a loss she can afford. I've preached FA, lived FA, even my husband has told her that she shouldn't care what other people think, that her opinion of herself is the only one that matters, but she's still fixated on what everyone else thinks of her. Which is understandable when you stop to think about how girls/women are bombarded on a daily basis with the demand that they be perfect in every way - and just when a few women look like they might actually have a chance at attaining that "perfection", the goalposts are moved. When the images we are given to live up to are airbrushed and photo-shopped to a fare-thee-well, is it any wonder that women have a hard time loving themselves/their bodies? When everything is sold to us in order to "help" us attain that "perfection" - from clothing to make-up to soap to diets to exercise. Personally, I've never been much into perfection - it's too much work. I'm satisfied with working toward things that make me happy, and striving for perfection isn't it. My house doesn't have to be spotless, but it does have to be clean. My clothes don't have to be the most fashionable, but they do have to fit and be colors/styles I like. I don't have to be athletic, but I do want to be as healthy as I can be - so I eat as well as I can afford within my gastrointestinal limitations and I do what exercise I can with my mobility issues. I don't do any of this to satisfy anyone but myself. I don't have to live up to anyone's expectations but my own.
Remember the movie, Looker, starring Susan Dey? How they were looking for perfect women, doing computer images of them, and then using those computer images to make television commercials? Are the airbrushed/photo-shopped pictures in magazines that much different? I'm really surprised that, with the level of technology we have today, that Looker hasn't come to pass and real, actual women haven't been done away with entirely.
As for that teenager that submitted her picture/comment to FYCG, the censure doesn't belong to her, it belongs to the moderator who allowed it to be posted. If it wasn't appropriate for the site, then the moderator should have told the teenager so and steered her to other sites that would have been more "appropriate". But to be nasty to a teenager who has finally learned to love her body in spite of society's messages to the contrary, no matter what her size, well, I'm sorry, but that's not very nice, and certainly not very admirable. She wasn't being malicious, she wasn't trying to rub her thin privilege in our faces - hell, I'm betting she didn't even know what thin privilege is (well, she probably knows now, she's probably gotten an education out of all of this, and not in a good way, sorry to say). It's one thing to flame trolls and to tell them off and boot them from FA spaces, but she wasn't trolling. She was celebrating learning to love her body, and that's something we should all be celebrating, no matter what size we are.