argh (TMI, be forewarned)

This may embarrass the guys. Be forewarned.

I think I may be starting to go through "the change." I get really pukey the week before my period (I don't actually throw up but walk around with an upset stomach, like I have a low grade viral thing). And I get cold. And I feel a lot crappier, physically, than I ever remember feeling before. (Luckily, with me, PMS is almost entirely physiological - I don't get the upset/cranky/easily brought to tears set up that some women get). I just kind of hurt, get muscle aches and things. And I'm tired, which really sucks. I get into bed to read and manage maybe fifteen minutes before I'm starting to fall asleep and drop the book and stuff.

I remember when my mom was starting - I didn't even realize what it was, I was kind of young - she was throwing up all the time. (She spent most of the family trip to Disney World looking for restrooms and staying off of the roller coasters).

Or maybe it's what they call perimenopause. I don't know. Whatever it is, it kind of sucks.

(I asked my gyn at the last appointment, her response was, "This is unfortunately how it sometimes goes for people; I can't find anything wrong with you that would suggest that it's anything BUT what you think it is").

She also thinks that for me - given family history and such - I could be dealing with this for as long as ten years. Oh joy.

Thank goodness for those buckwheat things you can heat up in the microwave and put on the ouchie parts, and for candied ginger (it keeps me from being TOO pukey without having to resort to something that might have side effects).

I've never complained about being female - I never felt discriminated against because of my gender and such - and I never had problems before. But I'm kind of not looking forward to dealing with this every month for the next 120 months, if my gyn is right. I don't know if soy would help; I tend not to eat much soy because my mom's actually allergic to it and I've heard that it may not be a great idea to eat TOO much; if you develop a cancer that feeds on estrogen it can make it worse. And I'm kind of unwilling to go the herbal route and take black cohosh and such; I have such weird reactions to some medications that have been rigorously tested that I sort of fear the herbals and what they might do to me.

The upset stomach and not-being-able-to-eat-normally is the worst part; I rely on dry cereal a lot for my meals because it's one thing I can trust not to make me feel worse. The people who make Cheerios probably never thought of that as a marketing strategy...

Jamie Oliver, go the F home...

Seriously. He is now in West Virginia, and is apparently going to nanny at the residents there about how they are too fat and eat crap.

I used to love "the Naked Chef," I enjoyed the simple recipes and stuff. But I am irritated that he's now using his position to act all superior to people.

I foresee LOTS more of this. LOTS. Even if we don't see laws restricting food or certain people's access to certain foods, we're going to have more guilt-trips laid upon us for simply enjoying food.

Look, I'm tired of people wanting to save us from ourselves. I'm tired of being told how I'm going to get Teh Diabeeeeetus! because I don't obsess every waking moment about not-eating and exercising more than I already do.

If you WANT me to develop an eating disorder, I'd understand the nannying better. Because seriously, if I lived in a house with someone who was constantly after me in the way the news heads talk about obesity and Teh Diabeeetus! and heart disease and cankles and everything else, I probably WOULD. Just to shut the idiot up.

It's a form of psychological warfare. They can't tie a would-be terrorist to a chair to interrogate him, but they can tell millions of American people that they're fat, repulsive, will be dead soon, are a major drain on health care, should be taxed more because of their fatty fat fatness, that they should "just push back from the table already," that they should "cultivate an attitude of avoiding sugar," that they should learn to fear and loathe food...and that's just peachy keen.

It's NOT about our health so much as it's about control. I don't think Oliver is the worst of these; he still seems to enjoy food. But the worst people, the real joyless Puritan sorts - it's almost as if they are disturbed by the fact that someone, somewhere is happy. THAT MUST BE STAMPED OUT! Especially if the happiness is coming as a result of pumpkin-chocolate-chip cookies, or a chai tea with full-fat milk and real sugar in it, or a nice big well-marbled steak.

There was some "dietician" on Fox News the other day talking about banning school bake sales to "save" little children from becoming obese. (She was a size 2, and I suspect NEVER struggled to keep her weight down. It's NOT simply a matter of "pushing back" from the table or avoiding sweets. And even if it were - telling someone to NEVER enjoy something sweet because it's "bad" for them and might make them fat is fairly cruel.)

Dammit, there WILL come a point when I get so fed up with this that I shoot my TV.

Gah. This is my biggest issue. I know I constantly bore people on here with it but it makes me utterly insane. I do make an effort to eat "healthfully" and I do work out an hour most days. I am sufficiently healthy that it is rare I have used up my $500 health insurance deductible before August. And yet, I am made to feel like "the enemy" because I am bigger than a size 8, and that's wrong and MEAN and evil.

And yet people justify it as being OK because it's "for my own good."

"I don' wanna get FAT"

This is sad and horrifying, if it's true.

I don't know how true or widespread it is, but I have noticed in my Youth Group, a number of the girls - and even a few of the boys - refuse to take the dessert, or won't eat chips, or sometimes won't even eat ANY of the dinner on offer. Their explanation being, "I'm on a diet" or "I don't want to get fat."

(Sometimes it's that they've already eaten. And I admit, I gnash my teeth a little over the kids who walk in with Burger King bags and eat their "separate" food "separately" because one of the goals we are currently failing at is to be cohesive as a group, and when kids don't even EAT together...well, that's a problem).

These are not fat kids. These are normal-sized and even skinny kids.

I also remember my youngest cousin going through phases of that - she was in sports and I suspect the pressure came from her coach. When she was 9 and 10, she was so skinny I was afraid to hug her - afraid I'd break one of her bones. She was a naturally slender kid but I'm afraid she was also restricting her eating to stay even slimmer. (Fortunately puberty redistributed things, her parents stressed to her that some flesh is necessary to health, and she looks more within the normal range of variation now, and she eats reasonably).

I'm kind of fat myself, which is why stories like this make me shudder. I've been in that self-hating place for my body looking the way it does. I've done (in the past) things like writing down EVERY food I ate and not "allowing" myself any food another person might not "approve" of on the list. I've gone through my house and thrown out all the cookies, crackers, butter, everything that was high calorie, and tried to live with only skim milk, lowfat cheese, and salad makings in the fridge.

And it's a miserable way to be. It is the worst kind of tyranny to live under, the tyranny of your own mind.

I can still unfortunately slip into the old self-hating patterns if I let myself - if I listen to too many "Fat Peoplez Gonna Die and It's a Good Thing Because Theyz So UGGGGLYYYY" stories on the news. Or if I even read some of the online health forums, where everything gets turned into a "Bash the typical American diet" or "Bash people who are not in the Underweight range of the BMI scale," or "Bash people who don't devote 8 hours a day to exercise and eat nothing but raw foods" topic.

So I worry a little bit that the coming Administration, in a misguided goal of "making everyone healthy" will buy into the idea that extreme slimness = good health, and no other combinations are possible. I hope we don't see more girls (and boys) going into disordered behavior, more people whose bodies just are prone to being larger demonized (and my big fear, being closed out of health-insurance plans), people being taught that food is something to fear and not to enjoy...

I suspect more teen girls have died from complications of anorexia and bulimia than have died from complications of being too fat. (And yes: I understand that eating disorders are a mental disorder, that they are related to OCD, that they can be helped by medications, and so, are not purely the fault of a screwed-up society telling people to be thin at any cost. But I know if I get "triggered" into feeling bad about my body by news stories, could it not affect someone who is more susceptible to that sort of behavior and attitude?)

I had a friend in high school who was bulimic. It was a horrible thing to see, it was horrible to hear her talk about herself that way. She has since recovered, and I'm glad. But I hate to think of other little girls going down that path when their bodies begin to change - when their God-given fertility starts up, along with the attendant deposition of fat - especially in a culture that tells women that their value is largely tied to their being skinny and pretty.

(And bringing God into it again....to tell young women that their "value" is in their outward appearance is, literally, a wicked thing... one thing I try to instill in my youth group kids is that we ALL have value, we are ALL children of God. What we look like, how much money our families have, what we do for a living - it doesn't matter. We are still important and valuable. But it's so hard working against the cultural influences that would deny the inherent value of some individuals).

Extremely wrong but also extremely funny.

And not for the easily offended...

Groovin' Granny sings about "big gazongas.". (Check out the "Shaft" parody about midway through).

This actually makes me (and my "sweater bunnies") feel better about the hearty dissing we received at the hands of Kohl's on Thursday.

(Warning: there may be pop-ups. The AD kind, I mean...what were you thinking?)

hard post to write.

Gah, this is very long. And very personal. But I'm not going to cut it; you can skim or skip if you want, this is partly therapy for myself.

This is kind of a hard post to write. This is very much "my stuff" and it may come across as kind of whiny. And some people who haven't "been there" might not totally understand. But this is something that has been percolating in my head for a while, and came to the surface last week, because of an incident that happened while I was working out:

I need to work on being nicer to myself. I actually have, at times, a kind of dysfunctional relationship with myself (if that's even possible). Like the absent parent who buys elaborate toys for their child, when what the child really wants is love and attention, I will buy myself books and craft supplies and such...and then drive myself so hard at work that by Friday afternoon I'm kind of glassy-eyed at my desk, but still berating myself to do more.

But even more than that: I also need to work on being nicer to myself re: the exercise/BMI thing. I tend to get VERY paranoid about my weight...moreso now because of the rumored "Wellness Initiative." One day last week I was actually screaming at myself (well, in my head; I didn't have enough breath to actually DO it) while I was working out because I felt like I wasn't moving fast enough. I believe I used the phrase "fat slug." And "Fat slob" and "ugly" and "repulsive" and all the horrible words that a person shouldn't use on anyone.

And OK, because I'm generally a let-it-all-hang-out type here: I really do have problems with this. I think part of it is all the societal stuff. I quit reading the fashion mags more than 10 years ago because I came to recognize that looking at models who possessed a genetic legacy for body-size very different from my own, and that these models were being presented as the IDEAL, was not good for my psyche.

But what is almost worse these days are all the news scare-stories. You know the ones: "OH NOES if you are 15 pounds over your ideal weight you are going to die SO soon!"

And because I'm fundamentally a rule follower - a person who wants to please the Powers That Be even at times when it's in contradiction with what I see as reality - I get really wrought up about this. Because, well, I'm considerably more than 15 pounds over the "ideal" weight (whether you look at the BMI charts or the old actuarial tables). And yeah, yeah, I know: I have a big frame. I have shoulders like the linebackers of 30 years ago. I have a large rib cage. (I know because I can feel it.) And I'm fairly muscular thanks to 15 years of working out nearly daily on a cross-country ski exerciser.

But that doesn't matter sometimes with the drumbeat of "OH NOES OBESITY" scare stories. It's kind of like...it's kind of like "IT," for those of you who've read "A Wrinkle in Time." It's always there, kind of under the surface, kind of an undercurrent. It kind of worms its way into my mind and takes up residence there whether I want it or not. And you have to actively work to resist it, sometimes with every fiber of your being.

(And before someone drops a comment recommending Weight Watchers or TOPS or one of the other diet plans: been there, done that. I did the "write everything down that you eat" plan. I did the "have no food other than 100% healthful food in the house" bit. And as for the "oh, just give up one sugared pop a day" or "just don't eat at fast food joints - I drink NO pop. If I ever eat fast food it's as a rare treat (less than once a month) because the waffle fries at Chick-fil-a? Are really kind of good. But it's a rare treat. My diet is actually pretty healthy. True, I may like sweets a bit more than is good for me but I do try to limit my intake. And I have philosophical objections to never eating a cookie or even bread again in the name of MAYBE getting down to a size 10 or something).

But anyway. The whole insidious message - which seems to imply that I am only a few ticks away from needing one of those carts to get around at the wal-mart, that suggests I am on the brink of Type II diabetes...it's hard for me to avoid it.

(And the thing that makes me wonder: if I, as an adult and fairly secure woman, and one of - if I do say so myself - higher than average intelligence - can get bamboozled into believing she's defective because of media hype, what of the prepubescent girls? I hope they really don't hear those "if you are 10 pounds over this number, your chances of dying from some horrible disease go up x percent...oh, and no man will ever love you either" stories)

But the thing is: the media hype and my objective reality don't seem to mesh.

If I told you what I weight - and I'm not gonna, I can't do that just yet, I'm not comfortable - a lot of people might seriously think (because women tend to lowball their weights so much in this culture) that I WOULD be riding one of those carts around in the wal-mart, and I would have to be shopping at a "special" store ("Mr. Paul's, the Tentmaker"?)

But the objective truth of my life? I have to restrain myself to keep from elbowing past people at the wal-mart because I walk faster - even at a somewhat relaxed pace - than 80% of the people around me. (Even in class - even on field trips, I'm the first one into the forest or to the middle of the prairie. Even though the students are 20 years younger than I am and mostly considerably slimmer).

And as for clothing? Size 14 in some things, 16 in others. Not that huge, at least not by "average American" standards. I could take a 12 in some things if I were in to the tight look, but I'm not. (Though I have heard of fashion designers reacting to being asked to design clothing for over-size-12 women as if you had asked them to go and roll naked in dog feces.)

And the media hype would suggest that I'm weak and flabby and can't do much.

And in my reality? I regularly lift 40 pound bags of soil, sand, whatever. I've carried buckets of soil that probably weighed 50 pounds (and the main problem with that for me was that the handle cut into my hand). I can get down on my hands and knees to fix stuff. (Last night I had to build a "critter excluder" out of hardware cloth - something pushed out and broke the old cover I had up over the crawl space, and raccoons or something were getting under my house. So I waited until the sounds of whatever critter was under there indicated it had left, and went out, crawled in behind my pecan tree, in the tiny space next to my air conditioning unit, and cut a piece of hardware cloth with tinsnips to the right size, and then used my handy staple gun to staple it on (thank goodness the person who built this place framed out the crawlspace with wood around the concrete of the foundation so I had something to staple into). (And yeah, I was kind of "Sarah Palin would be proud of me!" when I was done. Well, she probably would have been prouder had I SHOT the critter, but it's illegal to fire guns within the city limits...)

And you know? I kind of want to go to the people doing all the obesity scare stories and go "Look at me. I'm fat. And I did this thing. I'm not as disabled as you seem to think I am."

But...and it's hard for me to explain this to people who haven't been fat...there's a sort of cognitive dissonance that comes. On the one hand, there are ALL these stories in the media that induce a certain paranoia...stories that (let's be honest) make me feel like I am DEFECTIVE because of my size, and DEFECTIVE because I don't seem to want to do any of the "simple" things that it apparently takes to lose weight. (Again, the whole cutting-out-pop thing. When people suggest that it infuriates me. The beverages I consume in a day: two glasses of skim milk. One six ounce glass of orange juice. A bunch of water. Perhaps a cup of hot tea, usually without milk or sugar. Which of those should I cut, and how should I replace the nutrients that comes from it?)

I don't like feeling defective.

Because, part of it is: it contradicts my objective experience. Yes, I am fat. But I have also walked 10 miles in a day without negative effects the next day. Or spent several hours doing strenuous yardwork. Or carried lots of heavy items. I don't get out of breath easily (at least not when the relative humidity is below 90%, and that's an asthma thing, not a fat thing). I get less worn out working in the field than students 20 years my junior.

And another contradiction: we all hear "fat people die soon." My grandmother (who died about 20 years ago at 92) and my aunt (who passed recently at 90) were both fat like me. Fat in the same way as I am, I mean. And they made it to pretty ripe old ages. And my grandma was the one who had her grandkids getting after her for going up to fix her porch roof when she was in her late 70s. (My aunt was as active as she could be but had had both legs broken in a car accident when she was younger, and one had been badly set.) So I come from a line of fat, long-lived women. Fat, long-lived women who pretty much ate what they wanted. Who would have considered the "Cabbage Soup" diet to be something you ate only if you were too poor to have anything else. And given what the media say, fat and long-lived aren't supposed to be things that go together.

The other thing is the whole "U R DEFECTIVE" meme so contradicts what I have been taught at my church. A very simplistic version? There used to be a sign up in the Youth Group room that said: "I know I must be OK because God doesn't make junk."

There is a reason I am the size I am, and I do not think it is purely because my mother let me occasionally eat a Twinkie when I was young.

The other thing is that a lot of the whole "fat people are defective" idea is aesthetic - that some people don't like looking at bigger bodies, and so they think that shaming, and teasing, and belittling is the way to either get those bigger bodies to get smaller, or to stay out of their viewspace.

And that's probably where my drill-sergeant-like screaming at myself the other day came from. (Seriously, I was going as hard as I could. It was one of our typical mornings - high humidity - and I was pushing hard at 5.5 miles per hour. But I was angry with myself because I couldn't break 6.) And yelling at myself isn't going to make me get smaller. I did complete the workout, but I spent the rest of the day feeling crummy and low. And I think it's because I started out the day by insulting myself. And I ought not to do that. (I also seem to have pulled a shoulder muscle by pushing too hard. It's not bad enough to scale back on working out but I have been having to ice it a little.)

Part of it is I think our definition of beauty is narrower than it perhaps once was. And women are 'told' that they should conform to that definition however they can...whether by surgery or extreme dieting or makeup or whatever.

Oh, here's a little something:



This is sort of an unrelated thing (but really isn't). I cried the first couple times I watched that. Why? Because there are a number of women on there who look a little bit like me. Look much more like me than the women gracing the covers of magazines these days. I don't know if it's the rounder faces or what...but I can look at Botticelli's Venus and almost see a sister there.

For years, back when I was reading the fashion mags, there were times when I literally felt like I was a different species from the women modeling in them. Because I look so different from the typical model, at least the late 80s "Glamazon" and the early 90s "Waif Chic". And it does lead to a certain...I don't know, dissatisfaction. Or sadness. Or something. Maybe women with stronger self-esteem look at the models and snort and go, "Shyeah, they're freaks" but I (when I was in my 20s and still pretty insecure) looked at them and felt like the freak myself.

Which is why I love and cherish that little YouTube bit I've posted...a lot of the women, particularly the ones earlier on in the clip (from the beginning of the 500 year span) look a lot more like me...I feel like I belong to the same species as them...and then I realize that at some point in time, someone considered those women to be beautiful and worthy of painting...and it kind of makes me take a deeper breath and pull my shoulders back.

So I don't know. I probably am giving the people who speak disparagingly of women who aren't coat-hanger slim too much space in my head. And I'm probably reading too much into badly-reported medical studies where the "increased risk" that is so bruited is actually something like 2%.

But it's such a hard thing not to fall for! Even someone like me, and I'm pretty strong and I'm pretty good at calling B.S. on other things when I sense something is B.S....I can't quite break through on this. I get hung up. I don't know why. But I do want to be nicer to myself. I do not want to go through life looking at my thighs and going "why are you so big? I hate you" or looking at my face and wondering why my genetic combination makes me more of a pudding-face than Kate Moss or Kate Winslet or whoever the hell is currently popular.

I want to love my outside as much as I love my inside. But it's hard. Part of it is that our culture makes it hard, and part of it is that I have made it hard on myself.

Yipes.

It's meeting-time here, meaning that you get to hear the admini-speak of all the new administrators. It seems to me that admini-speak has two functions:

1. Obscure the "bad stuff" by cloaking it in mush-mouth words so people are either lulled into complacency or have zoned out by the time you get to the bit about their being no pay raises or that there is no budget for repairing equipment that breaks.

2. Take up the maximum amount of people's time by using eight words to do the job of one.

Oh, and I'm not entirely sure (because I tend to zone out when "verbed nouns" get used heavily) but I THINK one of the speeches used the word "actioning." Ugh.

Also, they're instituting a new "wellness initiative" here which makes me twitch a wee bit because all so often these are strictly tied to BMI and seem to have the goal of bullying people with bigger BMIs into diet plans or some kind of sanctioned exercise plan...now I do exercise, but it's on my own time first thing in the morning and I'll be damned if I'm going to change the exercise schedule I've had since 19-freaking-94 just so I can "walk on a track" under the supervision of some health-nanny. I just hope they don't jack up my health insurance premium because I'm fat - they just have to look at the fact that it takes me until AUGUST of each year to use up my deductible (and only then because I get immunotherapy for allergies) to realize I'm not a drain on their system.

And I'll be got-darned if I'll go on a diet. I know what food is healthy. I eat my vegetables. But I'm not going to count damn points or eat some prepackaged crap from Jenny Craig or cut out carbohydrates or some stupid thing. Been there, done that, I'm too old for it and life is too short.

Ironic, considering the news out this week that it's apparently sedentariness, more than body size, that leads to "poor metabolic health." Of course it will take 15 years for that realization to trickle down to the people who like to bully those with larger than a 28" waist....

Weekend

It's almost here, yay!

And I have some plans.

I've started (in kind of a small way) a change to my eating plan. (I do not call it a diet. I will not call it a diet. Because "diet" is another word, in my mind, for "deprive yourself until you have no tolerance left and you run around snapping other people's heads off for fun." And yes, I used to "diet" and that was pretty much what happened around Day 10 or so).

This is, instead: eat more nutrients. And limit "fun foods" to an average of 200 calories per day. ("Fun foods" - sweets, cookies, Chee-toes, potato chips [which I am really not fond at all of so it's no sacrifice to give them up], pop [ditto what I said for the potato chips], etc.)

Simple plan. I don't have to count calories if it's regular "nutritious" food, because frankly, I do pretty darn well when it comes to regular "nutritious" food. It's the snacking, or the emotional eating, or the desserts that do me in.

(All bets are off however once Christmas 2008 rolls around; I don't want to be "that woman" who minces around and goes, "but I can't eeeeeeeeeaaaaaaat that." And all bets are off if there is a net poundage change of 0 or a positive number come my annual checkup in May.)

(And yeah, it might be tough at times to stick to it. Though I will say I already decided to avoid a grocery-store "King Cake" that someone brought in the other day: looked at it, thought, "Is this worth not eating a couple squares of dark chocolate after dinner tonight?" decided "No" and left it be. And if I hadn't left myself the option of "this or chocolate" - making the option "this or nothing but regret later" I might have been more tempted. I do better with concrete things and concrete choices.)

At any rate: another thing that used to frustrate me back in my "dieting" days was the glacial pace of the "reward" of being thinner, stronger, my clothes fitting better, random guys whistling at me on the street [not that that ever really happened much but I suspect that's partly because I lived in a northern city that prided itself on being "enlightened" in those days, and random wolf-whistles at women were seen as a form of harassment]. (And yeah, yeah - I exercise too. I'm just one of those unfortunates who has a body that really, really likes to hang on to the fat it has. So I'm doing everything "right" and dropping maybe 4 ounces a week, while someone else I know cuts out one of the several Cokes he drinks in a day and loses 6 pounds a month...part of what kills me on these plans is what I see as the fundamental unfairness of that.)

So I decided to help this thing along a bit, I'll set up a "carrot" for myself. (because "sticks" never work very well for me): if I can stick to my goals of eating at least five servings of fruits and/or vegetables each day, if I can get "enough" lean protein, and if I can keep the average "fun" calorie expenditure 200 or less per day, every 2 weeks I get a treat of some type.

(No, not a food treat, I hasten to add. I'm smart enough to know that).

It can be little - a paperback copy of a mystery I want to read - or big.

This week, I decided because of the way time falls (I'm less busy this week, next week I'm tied up with volunteer work Saturday, the weather's good right now and it might not be later on), even though this is just the end of the first week, I am getting a big treat.

There is a smallish city to the south of me that has fantastic shopping. A couple of quilt shops, many antique stores, some of those stores that sell "stuff you don't need" (but that is, for me at least, life-enriching). So I'm going to take tomorrow and go shopping and just walk around the stores and if I see something I can use or that I want, I'm going to buy it.

(This is also predicated on the fact that I received a nice-sized check - payment for something I did a long time ago but suspected I was never going to see the money for - so it's "found money" in my book. And though I usually put "found money" in my savings account, this once I'm just going to enjoy blowing it.)

There's also a nice restaurant there with good pie. And I'm going to get a slice of pie. (Another rule of the game: if I want something more than the "fun calories" for a given day, I can "bank" for it by reducing the "fun calories" on adjacent days. So I'm doing that.)

I'm so looking forward to going. I have some research work to do this afternoon but if I get that done, I won't even need to come in tomorrow - so I can spend the whole day on me.

Part of it is the pleasure of being away from my usual haunts...one of the things about being "away" is that people can't call you up semi-last-minute and ask you to do something (I get that a lot. Don't know if I have needy friends or if I have an invisible "sucker" tattoo on my forehead, but I often get called in the evening to do something for the next day, something I don't particularly want to do).

Part of it is all the possibility - so many things to look at. I like antique shops particularly because of the chances of seeing something I've never seen before (I do not feel that way about the mall). All of the things I could consider buying and taking home with me.

Part of it is getting to spend a day with my own thoughts - not having to entertain anyone else, not having to be "on stage" with teaching or leading youth group or anything. My only responsibility (well, outside of the normal social niceties which I'd regard anyway) is to me, and my own contentment. Selfish? Maybe. But it's just one day now and then.

Part of it - especially in the quilt shops - is being around people who are enthusiastic about something I'm enthusiastic about. Who share my interest. Who can't wait to show me something they think I'd love, or that they love themselves.

At any rate: I promise not to become a tiresome diet-blogger. This may be the last time I mention this (unless it works great guns and I get to put up a very self-congratulatory post in a couple of months). But it seems to be something that will work for me, without feeling too much like I've locked myself in a cage with a chocolate cake sitting just out of my reach on a table, and I have to sit and see it and smell it every day while I gnaw on celery and Rye-Krisps. It's a lot easier to turn something down when I tell myself, "You could have this, or you could have a couple squares of Green and Black's Maya Gold after dinner" because it gives me the opportunity. (And it gives me something to look forward to; I very much need things to look forward to or I lose stamina fast.)

good enough/not good enough

First off: redfish, I kind of know what you're talking about. I have people call me up and go, "I'd like you to identify this plant I found." I tell them to bring me in a "good" sample of it - and they'll bring this twig, maybe with ONE leaf on it, but no flowers, no description of the height or habitat it grows in, and think I can magically tell them what it is from a leaf and part of a twig.

****

I was thinking this morning while doing my workout. I know I'm excessively good at laying guilt on myself (previously, it was "you're not working hard enough on research" type guilt; lately it's been more body-image type guilt).

I blame, in part, my habit of watching the news. And I also blame how the news has gone waaaaaaaay overboard (or so I think) on the War! On! Obesity! stories. (The latest being what pretty much amount to infomercials-on-the-news for either bariatric surgery or this new Alli stuff).

See, as I said before, I'm clinically overweight. In an ideal world, I'd probably weigh between 20 and 30 pounds less than I do. (Except I personally think - when I'm in a justifying sort of mood - that some of the "overweight" is muscle, thanks to my workout program. And losing weight isn't good if what you're losing is muscle). Up until just a few months ago, it didn't bother me that much. I could kind of roll my eyes and go, "Ah, ta hell wit' all that" when I'd hear some story about "OMG WTF Americans are like so obese." Because, you know? I'm not obese. And, you know? I don't eat at McDonald's and the other places that are generally held up as Targets of Blame in the whole situation (for that matter, I don't even really drink soda - I'm just not that fond of soda - I'd rather have a cup of tea). And, you know? I work out.

But the past few months, the drumbeat has become so insistent. Eat more vegetables. Lose more weight. If you're heavy, you're to blame for every single health issue that ever happens to you.

And I will admit there's a bit of paranoia in the whole thing for me - I've read stories of how in the UK, heavy people are denied certain medical procedures until and unless they lose weight. And I look at the possible D candidates, and I look at their likelihood of winning the White House, and I contemplate the world of having government-run healthcare - run by people who have private chefs and private trainers and who are "naturally" thin.

But the thing is: and I think this is something the media is far too good at - it is making a lot of us folks out here who are TRYING to do what is best for our health feel like what we are doing is not good enough. It is doing the old advertising trick of generating dissatisfaction - in this case, it's not dissatisfaction with the cars we drive or the brand of shoes we wear. It's dissatisfaction with OURSELVES. In some cases, with things about OURSELVES we may not be able to change.

(Quick question, show of hands: how many of you have heard someone in the last week exclaim, "I hate my body!")

Yeah, I thought so.

Because I've noticed myself taking that attitude more lately. I used to be more about, "Well, I'm bigger than the Madison Avenue standard - but I can lift 40 and even 50 pound bags of sand without a problem." or "But I can hike fifteen miles in a day if I need to." or "But I have the stamina to go five miles a day on a cross-country ski simulator."

But lately, I've been saying that to myself less and less. And it bugs me.

I've also found that I don't allow myself to enjoy things as much - I eat an oreo, and I think, my gosh, I shouldn't have done that. Or I look at my dinner and go, you should be cramming another serving of vegetables in there somewhere. Maybe you should dump that white rice. I also feel guilty on the days when I get up, start working out, but because it's 80* out and 75% humidity, I can't complete the hour without going into a near asthma-attack. Or on the mornings I sleep in because I slept badly the night before.

And dammit, I don't want to live this way.

I want to feel again like what I'm doing is good enough. Like taking an unscheduled day off from exercise once in a while is not a sin. Like it's okay to eat a meal without vegetables in it once in a while.

And I find myself wondering, as I hear the endless chain of news stories about how "fat bad! food bad! weight-loss surgery good!" what the motivation is.

Is someone receiving kickbacks from somewhere?

Is this an attempt to, by creating an unhealthy obsession with weight in the American public, maybe distract us from something else (like, perhaps, an erosion of rights: maybe we'll wake up ten years from now and find that there's a ten-day waiting period to buy a pound of butter? Or that grocery stores have been replaced by government "feeding centers" where people file in, are weighed, have their blood pressure and cholesterol checked, and then are given a ration of food that is supposedly tailored to their own particular health "issues"?)

Is it that people in the news media - which seems to ever more falling under the dominance of the entertainment industry - are being brainwashed into believing that fat is ugly, that no person over some magic (low) weight can be attractive or appealing or worthwhile, and they feel it's their duty to scare all of us into weight loss.

I don't know.

I do know...and here's a pre-emptive strike to stave off what someone might say:

To the person who would say to me, "Oh, just go on a diet already, lose the weight, and stop whining," I'd ask you: Have you ever been on one? Have you ever had a weight problem (And I mean - more than the five-pounds-so-you-look-good-in-a-swimsuit type of weight loss problem).

For some of us, it's not a simple matter to lose weight. I have BEEN on diets. I have done the "count every calorie of everything you eat in a day and try to keep it under 1250 calories diet." I've done the "no processed food of any kind, just food as God made it" diet. I've done the "no sweets, no processed flour, no meat, no full-fat cheese" diet. I also did various exercise programs - in particular, I remember, running up and down the six flights of "fire stairwell" stairs in my apartment building, with ankle weights on.

At the most, I'd lose about five pounds in a year.

And, while doing that, I'd be miserable - in some cases (especially that damn 1250 calorie a day thing I tried while I was in college) - cranky and weak.

And eventually, a few years ago, I said, "forget that mess" and went back to eating more or less normally. Now granted - I don't eat what I want. If I did, I'd eat fried chicken a lot more often. I'd eat pizza a lot more often. I'd eat salads a whole lot less often.

And I've read about setpoints, and about how some people's bodies just seem to be designed to be bigger than others. And even at my lowest adult weight, I was still in double-digit dress sizes - I don't think I could get down to the once-much-vaunted-and-now-considered-a-little-BIG-actually size 8. At least, not without starving myself.

So I don't know. I suppose the prescription is to ignore the news stories as much as possible (but again: that little paranoid feeling - what if my workplace institutes a mandatory "wellness" program, as some places have, where incentives [like not having to pay out the ass for health insurance] are linked only to a person's weight, and not to how they eat or how they exercise, or how they live].)

Honestly? What I'd like is this: I'd like a little credit given for the things I DO do to protect my health:

eating leafy greens
working out an hour a day (or as long as I can, if less than an hour, without going into respiratory arrest from the humidity) five days a week
flossing my teeth
wearing a seatbelt when I drive
not smoking
not tanning
limiting my consumption of foods (like cured meats) suspected to cause cancer
eating lots of fruit
limiting how much fried stuff and other high-fat food I eat.

But instead - it seems that the media version you hear is, "Nope, none of that is good enough; you must do MORE."

And, screw "more". I'm tired of "more." I want to go back to "enough."

and...

Okay, maybe I figured out why the girl was hanging out in front of the machine.

She was calling someone to bring her a dollar bill in exchange for her change. Dang machine - even though it has a coinslot - will only take bills (I do not know why. It gave me the correct change for my dollar, so it's not like it's outta change.)

I will also observe that the Obesity Police seem to have got to the vending business. That packet of Cheetos had like four cheetos in it

(cheetos? cheetoes? What's the right plural there?)

I hate that. I hate the whole obesity-police thing, where EVERY SINGLE STINKING "health" story on my local news is about some new weight-loss fad, or about some obscure disease you are 1% more likely to have if you are really, really fat.

I hate being made to feel like I'm taking my life in my hands every time I eat a Cheeto, or go get carry-out Mexican, or go a day without downing the requisite five to seven servings of vegetables (which is frankly most days. I do not think there are seven different vegetables that I like and that are "in season" at the same time.)

(Standard disclaimer: I'm not really, really fat. I'm clinically overweight but I'm so sensitive about "not conforming" so I often feel like those obesity scare stories are a finger pointed right at me).

They did a )$(%*$@# seven-minute commercial (because that's really was it was) on this new Alli crap the other day (It's this pill for weight loss. Supposedly you lose 50% more weight on it. So if you were going to lose 2 points on your own, you'd lose 3 by taking this medication. Oh, and it's also a nice "punishment" for people who don't conform to the diet - if you eat too much fat, you get "anal leakage." [which are words I hope to never, ever write on this blog again].)

Basically, they spent their "health" segment talking about how "great" it was, and how it "totally helped me succeed" (as one woman said.) I don't know if it blocks appetite or if it's just the fear of the unappealing side effect that kept people on the diet plan.

I tend to be skeptical of any kind of medication that is, you know, not aimed directly at keeping you from dying or preventing major pain. There are too many side effects, too many interactions. (I remember the Fen-Phen lawsuits.)

This morning, they were talking about a new drug that may be approved here - basically, it makes people lose weight because it *blocks the pleasure centers in the brain.* Yes. Blocks the pleasure centers. (It's also promoted as a stop-smoking drug, apparently). The only problems, they found, in the trials were that many people had to drop out because they experienced severe depression.

Wait, what's the emoticon I want here?

O_o

I think that fills the bill.

Or maybe

:~/

They block people's brain pleasure-centers with a drug, and then they report (with some surprise) that a goodly proportion of those people became depressed?

I don't know. I'm all in favor of people being able to do things to lose weight (if they want to, if it's within the realm of what's healthy for them), but I kind of think we've gone too far when they begin talking about medications to remove the pleasure from eating (and, apparently, other things).

To me, that's too much like - oh, I don't know, using a caustic to burn off someone's taste buds so they won't eat so much. Or wiring jaws. Or I don't know what.

Look, I try to eat healthfully. (See the complaint about the vegetable servings above). But part of life is enjoying the simple things, and frankly, I want to be able to enjoy my meals. I don't care if it means I'm 10 pounds heavier than I otherwise might be. It just seems like too much messing with a person's head to give them something to make them enjoy eating less.

WTF?

Okay, I do not get this...

I headed down to our "mini vendeteria" (which is actually a pop machine and a snack machine). I wanted to buy some pretzels or chips or SOMETHING to supplement my lunch because, well, at 6:30 am when I normally pack it, I am NOT hungry, and very often at noon I open up the lunch kit and go, "Aw, man. Why didn't I pack more?"

(especially today - I teach until 5:20, have an off-campus meeting at 5:30, probably won't be home until 7:30 or later).

But anyway. The vendeteria. There was a girl there, standing right in front of the snack machine. Okay, I thought, I'll hang back, let her make her selection, and then do mine.

But she stayed there. Talking on her cell phone. Like she was guarding the dang machine (Seriously? If there was one Zinger left in there and she wanted it for her friend, she'd just have to tell me.)

But I'm not a bargey sort of person, so I wandered over to the water fountain ("....I'm just here to get a drink"), checked on the lab-setup in my lab, and then came back. Yup, still in front of the machine.

I suppose I would have been justified barging in but one of my little "issues" is that I don't like other people - especially women thinner than I - to see me getting snacks out of a vending machine. It feels so stereotypical: "Here's the fat chick totally dependent on the machine for her salt or sugar fix." (Yeah, I know. I have big problems about feeling that everyone's judging me.) But still. I'd like a little privacy to pick out my cheetoes or my Grandma Whoever's fakey-tasting faux-homestyle cookies.

Cell phones, I'm thinking more and more, are destroying simple manners in this country - it's as if everyone's enclosed in a bubble and no other people matter.

Hopefully she's left by now - so I can go get whatever salty thing (and whatever sweet thing) I want that the machine has.

your body-image comment of the day

One of my friends was telling me about a woman she knew, someone who had had an ex who played all kinds of horrible mind-games with her. The woman was about 6' tall and had always been on the slender/athletic side, but he convinced her she was too fat, so she dieted and exercised down to 120 pounds.

Which, I don't care how you slice it, is not enough body mass on a 6' tall woman. Especially one who used to be athletic (muscle weighs more than fat).

She got rid of the ex and gained back some of the weight but was bemoaning to my friend (who has a body kind of like mine - fattish, but in decent physical shape - she's active and strong) that she had gotten "so fat" and that she wished she was 120 pounds again.

She told my friend, "I can't see my hipbones. I feel too big when I can't see my hipbones."

I kind of shook my head, and observed, "If I want to see my hipbones, I'll go and have an x-ray taken."

I mean, seriously - a few women may be genetically predisposed to be thin enough that you can see a bit of their hipbone, but in most women that's a pathology.

I dunno. As much as I sometimes bemoan being single, there's a lot to be said to not be dealing with all kinds of stupid-ex garbage. Like thinking that having a body with enough mass on it so that you are not in amenorrhea is "too fat."