Yesterday was great until just before bed when I found myself properly physically hungry but didn’t think through what was going to fill me up with the most nutrition and the least calories.  Instead, I reached for the “easy food” and had peanut butter crackers and then cereal.  I ended up full but they weren’t the best choices.  What would have been?

Well – I had completely forgotten about the strawberries in the fridge, already sliced, which I could have had with a bowl of yogourt with some oats sprinkled on top.  That would have been filling, satisfying to eat and tasty.  Next time.

Every once in a while I check in on the Paul Plakas website because I enjoy his monthly question and answer blog.

Hi Paul,

I am almost 32 years old and have an active lifestyle. I’m 5′3 and 110lbs and like the look of my body EXCEPT I have “fat armpits”. I’m getting married in 5 months and have a strapless dress and would like to get rid of my “fat armpits” before the date. Could you recommend a few exercises that would target the area and help me get rid of them?

Thanks!

Audrey from Calgary

Hi Audrey,

Since you are already at a good weight and just want some spot reduction your only option is liposuction. There are no exercises you can do to remove fat off specific parts of your body.

This one made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.  FAT ARMPITS?  I admire Paul for his restraint and, as always, his bluntess.

But sadly, I think the question reveals a person who just doesn’t see the Big Picture of her slim trim body and who, every time she looks in the mirror, sees only her armpit issue.

I hope, before she’s 40, Audrey learns to love her little body and wear clothes that cover up her “imperfections”.  Otherwise she’s going to get to middle age never having felt young and attractive like she should.  How many overweight middle aged women wake up to the fact that they weren’t nearly so fat in their younger days as they thought they were?

Love your bodies, women!

Love your bone structure because that isn’t going to change no matter how much or little you weigh.

Love your eyes and your toes and your knees and even your armpits because those are what they are – and they probably look exactly like your mother’s.

And before you consider that liposuction, ask the person who loves your body more than you do if they mind your little physical quirks.  If the answer is yes, dump them.

Stand back from the mirror, look at the whole picture and be thankful. Any other way leads to madness.

I do.  I blame Lycra.

A pair of jeans with a bit of Lycra can accommodate five extra pounds without cutting or grabbing.  Some might think this is a good thing but it does no favours for those of us who are prone to five pound gains which turn into ten, fifiteen, twenty pound gains.

Aside: Does that remind anyone else of School House Rock? Not the weight gain obviously, but the counting by 5′s song?

Anyway – I guess this all takes me back to the fact that I don’t have an objective view of my body shape and size or I might notice a five pound weight gain even if my clothes are still comfortable.  Or is that wrong?  Surely a tightening waistband has always been the first sign of putting on a few pounds!  And now we’ve lost that small but important tool.  It takes at least 10 pounds before my clothes don’t fit.

So it’s back to the mirror, the tape measure and the scales to keep this weight in control.

Just writing that makes me feel exhausted.  I’m exhausted by my own inability to take care of myself.  I’ve had SO much stress these past six months that I have lost all enthusiasm for this process.  But I haven’t lost the determination to never be fat again.  I’m still a healthy BMI and I plan to stay that way.

So there’s no option unless someone somewhere cares to let me in on a previously undisclosed miracle for keeping off weight that doesn’t include balancing calories consumed with calories expended.

Anyone?

I didn’t think so.

Back to the journal I go.  Where I will honestly and consistently write down what I’m eating until someone comes up with something better.

Post Script Thought:  My belts are all a bit big now.  If the waistband isn’t going to tell me about five pounds, I guess I should buy a couple of belts that will keep me informed.  Hmmmmm – after next payday.

I don’t have a lot of time but wanted to report back on my fitness assessment.

I went with my lovely daughter who feels pretty much recovered from several years of chronic fatigue syndrome but hasn’t been able to exercise in all that time.  Because she’s been worried about putting on weight and not eating right, I thought momentarily about signing her up for Weight Watchers – but really only momentarily.  I thought about all the money I’d paid into the WW coffers over the years and about how much better it would have been if I’d spent that money getting in shape and learning about nutrition.  So that’s my 21st birthday present to her – 3 months of weekly visits to a personal trainer.

We met with our lovely new trainer, Svetlana, to go through the Polar BodyAge fitness test.

I was pleasantly surprised by how chilled out and unselfconscious we were about our less than perfect bodies.  I got the feeling that Svetlana mostly meets women who hate their flaws and aren’t happy even with the good bits.  I think she was a little surprised by how matter of fact we are about our own and each other’s bodies.  It seems that years of watching Trinny and Susannah together have made us very blunt about such things – in a loving and (we think) funny way – but it must seem a bit strange to an outsider.

So here’s how it panned out for me:

Nutrition was good though I was describing my normal diet at home with the husband rather than what I’ve actually been doing to myself for the past week. (yes, “doing to myself” is the best description I can find.)

Cardiovascular, strength and flexibility were all fair or average – so no surprise there and a pleasant change from “poor” when I did an assessment eight years ago.

The big surprise was my body composition which, using skinfold measurements, was only 23.5% fat.   I guess  my skinny limbs balanced out my fat tummy because the belly definitely needs shrinking but there are no bingo wings in sight.

And the final pleasant surprise is that my body-age is two years less than my real age.  I turn 49 next week but my body is only 47.  And, apparently, my goal for the next few months is to get it down another 12 years.  (oh, really?)  So I will be 35 by summer.

The daughter had good news too: she’s officially a beautiful young woman who just needs to do a bit more exercise, tone up her gorgeous curves and eat breakfast – not nearly as de-conditioned as we thought she might be.

I have a session next week to plan out my exercise routine for the coming months and I’m looking forward to it more than I thought I would.

I’m thinking that my life’s work should be to discover an antidote to the phrase “I feel fat”.

I know that even skinny girls “feel fat” once in a while. I know that weight/body/food strugglers feel fat (and feel thin) all the time – regardless of available evidence.

These past couple of weeks for me were a storm of virus, hormones, travelling, work stress and health worry. The virus stopped me exercising and the rest made for some chaotic eating. The result was that I “felt fat” and even watched the scales start to creep up to the point that I didn’t want to stand on them.

Because, you know, if you don’t weight yourself then the weight hasn’t changed.

If I had kept up the daily weighing, I would have seen the weight come down too but I let my “I feel fat” head rule for days. Then, yesterday before the MRI, I had to get weighed.

I’m happy to report that I don’t care about situations like that any more but I do guess what the number will be and I was thinking 153lbs because, well, I was “feeling fat”. Anyway – fully clothed, in the middle of the day, I weighed 148lbs. Absolutely fine, normal and not “fat”. Really. I need a brain transplant.

So I stepped on the scale this morning and all is well. I still have 9 days in which to NOT eat my worry about the results of the MRI but I’m so pleased to be starting from normal and not some silly imagined inflated weight.

And I still need to figure out an alternative to “feeling” when it comes to body image.

I hate to spend so much time worrying or even wondering about what I look like but I know that really grasping the difference between me fat and me thin will help me to keep this weight off. So what do I know now?

• I know how much I weigh and I know how tall I am.   The BMI chart tells me I’m at the high end of a healthy weight.

• I know my bust, waist and hip measurements.  The handy-dandy red, yellow and white tape provided by the National Health service tells me that I’m in the “at risk” category and need to reduce my waist size by at least an inch and a half.

• I know that I’m an inverted triangle with a tendency to put on weight on my torso.  When overweight, I look like the archetypical prison matron – not that I ever encountered one of those when I worked in a prison.

• I know that, when I lose that torso fat, I have subtle curves and have been identified by trainers as a “mesomorph” – for all the good that does.

So I know all these things about the size and shape of my body but I don’t know what I look like.

Mirrors are useless – except to show me that my skirt is the right length or my jeans need ironing or it’s time to colour my hair.

Photos help a little, sort of, sometimes.

It’s time for the People Watching Intervention!

I haven’t done this for a couple of years but it was very helpful last time.  First pick a person in your life who doesn’t have weight/body issues and who will be honest with you.

Then go to a public place, either indoors or wait for some warm weather because it doesn’t work if everyone is wearing heavy coats.

Park yourself in a busy place with cups of coffee and watch the world go by.  Your job is to try to identify people who approximately the same shape and size as you are.  Your partner’s job is to tell you you’re warped. After about an hour, if you’re paying attention, you might come to realise that you’re not as big as you thought you were.

It’s fun, it’s sociable, it’s almost free and it’s cheaper than therapy.

In the absence of a large indoor mall, I’m going to have to wait for the temperature to rise a few degrees but it’s definitely on my To Do list.

In the meantime, the husband sometimes points out a woman and says, “I bet you wish you looked like her.”  I always affirm this and he says, “You do!”. Oh.  Gotta work on this.

I have a little theory about body image that I’ve never written down before and here it is:

Women (and men?) have an image of themselves based on one or two body parts that concern them.

One rare day when the husband had joined me on a shopping trip I stepped out of a changing cubicle to show him an outfit in front of the main mirror.  He pointed out that my eyes always went directly to my stomach – that bit of my body that makes me most self-conscious.  And he’s right. My belly is really what I’m changing when I’m losing weight and that’s where my eyes go when I’m looking in the mirror.

Not long after that, the media began chattering about Calista Flockhart’s weight and it started me wondering if she was trying to diet her round face into a different shape.

Then I took my perfectly shaped young teenaged daughter shopping.  My strongest childhood clothes shopping memories are of being the overweight child weeping my way through the “Chubbies” section of Sears with my distraught mother.  Later I become the overweight teen trying to find clothes that looked as good on me as they did on my thin friends.  (But that’s another blog entry.)

So I was so looking forward to taking my tall, slim gorgeous young teen shopping for clothes.  When she came out to show me her first outfit I noticed her looking down towards the bottom of the mirror rather than at the whole stunning “look”.  Her reason?  “I hate that fat on my feet.”

I kid you not!  She has a little pad of fat on the top of her feet near the ankle – weird but true – and that’s all she could see.   Not the perfect little curves or the flat tummy or the overall stunning effect.

So what’s your “flaw” – the one body part that upsets you most?  Does your body image revolve around that one imperfect part?

Oddly perhaps, I don’t worry about my flaws when I see myself naked.  The curves seem to all be in the right place and they make sense on a female body.  But clothes just never hang right and the whole exercise becomes about hiding the stomach area.  Even when I’m not overweight, I still instinctively look and criticise every bump and roll around my middle. I KNOW they won’t all disappear unless I diet myself into oblivion (à la Calista) so I guess I’d better work on acceptance – appreciation even.  (Yet another topic!)

There are two ironies in this story.

The first is that, while I’ve been worrying about my stomach, people have been looking at my legs – which are a lovely gift from my mother.  An old friend once told me how jealous of me she’d been in high school because of my thin muscular legs.  All I could do was laugh and tell her how jealous I’d been of her flat stomach.  Girls.

The other irony is that, now that I’ve gone some way towards losing that belly, just about every top hanging in the stores looks like it was designed to conceal a seventh month pregnancy.  Where were they when I needed them?  Why did I have to suffer the advent of “skinny tees” and “cropped tees” and “low rise jeans”?  Hey?  Answer me that, fashion industry.

Oh well, I’d suppose I’d rather have unsuitable clothing on the shelves than unsuitable fat on my belly.

As always, I’m a work in progress. More on this tomorrow.

I’ve got a list somewhere that I can’t quite recall – maybe in my head. This list is studies that I would like to do or at least read the results of.

The study that came to mind yesterday would be titled something like: The effects of diet and exercise on self-perception.

All the participants would be chosen according to negative body image then grouped so that some did nothing at all, some dieted only and some exercised only. They would be (somehow?) prevented from weighing or measuring themselves for three months and instead asked to review regularly how they feel about their bodies.

The final analysis would correlate improved or reduced positive self-perception with intensity and type of exercise, injury and, of course, final weights and measurements.

I’m pretty sure that the exercise group would show the most gains regardless of weight lost.

And I feel that way because, after two trips to the gym, I feel better about my body. My feelings can’t be because I’ve lost a pound and a half of water weight. Instead, I think exercising makes me like my body more because I like what it can do. I value it because I see how I can stress it and it can bounce back. I feel more in touch with it because I’m aware of my muscles and my lungs.

Just a thought.

And when I find that list you will be dazzled by the vast volume of useless information/ desire for useless information that clogs my brain.

It’s doppelganger week on facebook and I’ve been reminded of my total lack of visual recall.  Basically, I don’t accurately remember what anything or anyone looks like.  Instead, I remember vaguely and the result is that every time I say, “Doesn’t he look like so-and-so?!”, the answer is, “No, not at all.”

That applies to myself.  Beyond dark brown hair and greenish eyes, I’m not so good at describing myself.

I’m not sure that this face recognition software is any better than my warped memory.  It’s first choice was Jared Padalecki!  Young, sort of pretty in that mannish way – oh dear, this isn’t doing much for my self-image, though I suppose he could be my son. 

I tried three different photos and the only celebs to come up on all three were Lucy Lawless (me, Xena?  I don’t think so)

and the inevitable Liza Minelli.  

On reflection, the program picked up on my small features, jawline, eyes that squint when I smile and the bangs/fringe (depending on your nationality).

Who I really wanted to show up was Isabella Rossellini.  In middle age, of course.  I guess she doesn’t look like me at all – see – told you I didn’t know what I looked like except in a vague way.  She does have dark hair.

And how does this relate to body sanity?

Well, I’m sitting here weighing 23 pounds less than I did two years ago but I don’t see it.  I want to see it. I turn 49 in less than three months and by the time I’m 50 I want to know what I look like.  I want to see the difference between me at 170 and me at 140 – not just in photos but in the mirror – clothed, naked, face, body – every which way.

I can’t fix the visual memory problem – that’s part of me.  But I do want to sort out the body image thing.

Edit!

I found a photo from two Christmases ago and stitched it together with one from this Christmas.

OK – I see the difference. How come I don’t see it in the mirror?  And how come I don’t see the changes as I gain weight?

I truly hope to one day have the answers to those questions.

I caught the tail end of some news magazine tv show a week or so ago.  You know the kind, something like 20/20 or Dateline.  It was talking about the magazine and internet ads for weight loss. You know the ones I mean, it shows a before and after picture and the ad says something like, Take Off 50 Lbs in 2 Weeks With This Amazing Weight Loss Secret.  It always has a before and after picture and a testimonial from Wendy or Joe or Bonny or whoever.  According to the tv show, one of the women featured in the ad HAD taken off weight, but had done it over a longer period of time by working out and reducing her food intake.  She made the mistake of posting her before & after pictures on the internet and the pictures were pirated to be used in the ad.  Apparently there were several other people who had the same thing happen to them.  One guy sold his picture and the company that bought it then used photo editing software to create the after pictures.

As skeptical as I am about these ads, I must admit that it didn’t occur to me that the pictures were stolen or photo shopped.  I guess if I had really thought about it, I would have figured that they had either just exagerated the story or there was some creative photography taking place.  So why did this story stick in my mind? Because anytime I see those ads, there is always a split second that I’m tempted.  Maybe it would work.  Maybe there is a magic something that would melt off 50 lbs in 2 weeks without exercise or diet.  Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause.

I will admit that I have been suckered into some of these pitches in the past.  I remember trying the grapefruit diet, there was one very silly one involving aroma therapy which was supposed to stop your appetite.  There was even one that involved getting needles every week and the scary thing is that I have no idea what was in the needle.  I know that there is only one way to take off weight – eat less, move more.  Too bad it took me so long to come to this realization.

OK….big deep breath……I think I finally see the body changes.

I went into town today and tried on some wool trousers.  As usual I took a size I knew would fit and a size I thought might fit.  The little ones were almost too big.

I repeated the exercise in another shop with the same results.

At one point I muttered to myself, “You’re almost small.”

Doesn’t sound like much but it’s quite a big deal.

NOW…..here’s what usually happens when I get to this stage:  I don’t take the time to look carefully at my smaller self and get used to what I look like.  Instead, I get focused on the farcical idea that “the diet is over” and I start eating anything I want.  Before I look in the mirror again, the moment is over. And six months down the line, I’m back to where I started.

So this time, it’s all going to happen SLOWWWWWWWLY.

I’m going to keep trying things on and remarking that I am almost small.

I am going to keep journalling what I’m eating.

I’m going to keep noticing until, well, I’m not sure until what.  I’ll let you know when I get there.