Thoughts on the Process » Talking It Off

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Body Image, Thoughts on the Process 2 Responses »

Feb 232010

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.

Body Image

Body Image, Thoughts on the Process No Responses »

Feb 222010

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.

More on “Results Are Typical”

Thoughts on the Process 2 Responses »

Feb 202010

My Weight Watchers career is like a motorway car crash. I know I don’t really want to see it but I can’t resist looking and today I saw written evidence of much of my UK WW “wreck” . Ready?

They don’t have my 1995 card but they do have records for 1998, 2000 and 2003. I guess I imagined 2001. Either way, never mind the losing, the worst thing is that I’ve regained weight at least four times in the past fifteen years. As I wait for an MRI on my biliary system I’m very aware of the research on the the risks of this type of “weight cycling”. sigh. Don’t do it, kids!

In 1995 I didn’t have scales but I was the smallest I’d been since I weighed around 135lbs in my 20′s but by March 1998 I was back up to 158lbs (which I thought was very heavy) and worked hard until July to get to 142 and Gold for the first time ever.

Here’s what is written about my “Maintenance” career:

28 July 98 – 142
11 Aug 98 – 142
18 Aug 98 – 143
17 Nov 98 – 147.5

And then I go back to “real” life – or so I liked to call it. No more obsessing about food (ie paying attention to what I was eating), no more thinking about whether or not I was eating more calories than my body needed.

My next weigh-in was almost two years later:

10 Oct 00 – 163.5 – more than 20 pounds over my goal weight.
I go to meetings for exactly four weeks, losing 5.5lbs and give up again.

Another two years go by during which I no doubt diet a few times and bounce around down and up a few pounds.

1 Apr 03 – 160.5 Here we go again. I only stuck around for a couple of weeks but I know that I did take off the weight because I joined BCB and did it with on-line support and accountability. I got back down to the low 140s in time for a major wedding event at a castle.

Five years later, in January 2008 I was up to 170lbs on my home scale so let’s say 173 at a Weight Watchers meeting – a full 30lbs heavier than I was in 1998.

And this is where the sun rises, the light dawns, the penny drops – add your favourite cliché. If I don’t want to be fat, I have to make “forever” changes. Well duh. In my life I’ve been an academic achiever but brains mean nothing in the weight loss world. If you don’t think you can make permanent changes then you are doomed to a life on the weight loss/weight gain pendulum.

I managed to lose over 20lbs on my own but hit a sad life blip with disaster in my parents’ lives and put on a few pounds. Before that “blip” could get too far out of hand, I decided I needed a little face-to-face accountability and went back to WW. I weighed in at 158lbs in May 09. Nine months later I am 10lbs lighter.

But here’s the big news. After more than two years, I’ve had only that one fluctuation of more than 5lbs and that happened during a time of huge emotional upheaval.

That gives me hope for the rest of my days. I know that the next few years will bring on the menopause and a natural tendency to weight gain. I know that my body will age. I know that life will continue to throw out the curve balls of health issues and sadness and all the other challenges of life. But I’m NOT rolling over and giving up. I will keep moving and keep eating well, knowing that the alternative is so detrimental to my health and my sanity.

I feel a twinge of excitement at the thought of real permanent change in my life. Of course my little cynic is whispering “Just you wait”, but I’m going to ignore it and just get on with it. Maybe it’s the fact that the Olympic skeleton finals are on while I’m writing this, but I think I might hear a crowd ringing cowbells and shouting “Woo Hoo Millie! You can do it!”

Life Lessons, Food Lessons

Food, Thoughts on the Process 3 Responses »

Feb 162010

When my mom’s best friend was dying of breast cancer, she told me something that has rattled around in my head for the past dozen or more years. Sitting there holding her mug, she uttered the simple words, “I wish I’d never given up cream in my coffee.”

Yes, she was a lifetime yo-yo dieter. I’d seen her overweight and slim but she was always beautiful – naturally so as well as perfectly groomed and dressed.

“I wish I’d never given up cream in my coffee.”

A couple of years later, my mom threw another “rattler” into my psyche with, “You know, I’ve worried every day of my life about being fat.”

These things were said by 70 year old women – women with wisdom and experience and intelligence, a shared wicked sense of humour and a resilience for all the hard things life threw at them.

I use those two phrases to keep a check on my crazy levels so I guess it’s as good a time as any to ask them again.

Will I one day regret not having cream in my coffee? (not that I like cream in my coffee – but the equivalent for me)

I’ve just asked the husband if he really misses anything from the days when we ate with no real thought for fat content or calories in general. He figures he misses home-made pizza and full-fat Cumberland sausage with mash with (his) home-made Yorkshire pudding – but fully acknowledges that we only stopped making them because we didn’t have a family here to eat them and would eat the whole lot ourselves. We still have these meals when we have a crowd to feed.

And me? I don’t think so. We like both the taste and ritual of food too much to banish things we really like. I’m not a great cook but I love having people round the table eating and drinking and laughing. I actually think that’s when I feel properly alive – does that sound funny? This past weekend we served Jamie Oliver’s Five Hour Braised Lamb – two big pans which just got plonked on the table and everyone served themselves. Happy times.

There are certainly some foods that I don’t trust myself to have in the house unless a crowd is going to eat them. Did I say some? I meant loads and loads -truckloads – and that’s right near the top of my list of things to conquer in the next part of my life. Though I did have a little breakthrough in that arena this morning. I went to get blueberries out of the freezer and realised there was ice-cream left over from the weekend’s dinner party. Not long ago I would have ditched porridge with blueberries for an ice-cream breakfast but it just didn’t appeal.

That’s actually bigger than most people would understand. I’ll let you know if I succumb. Maybe that can be my Lenten discipline: living for 40 days with a tub of ice-cream in my freezer. Wow – that sounds spectacularly pathetic.

Will I look back and say that I’ve spent every day worrying about my body?

Maybe not every day and I had a few “skinny breaks”, but from the age of about 8 till 47, I spent an obscenely wasteful number of hours worrying about being fat. Even when I wasn’t particularly fat. (I’ve just identified a precious gift from my mother!)

When I saw these Before and After Quitting photos, I felt sad for my young mom self. There was so much good going on in my life: I had amazing family, great friends and life was full – but I worried and worried about my body without actually taking control of the situation. That’s the regret – not that I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror, but that I didn’t just do something about it.

So the next logical question for me is: Is writing daily about weight issues not just another way of “worrying”? Oddly, it’s not. It’s a way of saying things and getting them out of the dark corners of my mind into daylight where I can see how useful or harmful they are. It’s my way of “doing something” that I should have done all those years ago. I have stacks of journals full of my handwriting covering more than twenty years – but I never once used them to DO SOMETHING about the one thing that made me so unhappy.

So here we are, all caught up to the present.

Is there a lesson?

Don’t give up cream in your coffee if you really love it.

But don’t eat the ice-cream in the freezer just because it’s there.

More Thoughts on Slow Dieting

Keeping Going, Thoughts on the Process 8 Responses »

Feb 152010

What do you think of this article?

For a long time, I wanted to be in the “Diets don’t work” club. I love the idea of telling everyone that I will never diet again – but I quickly learned that meant being fat forever.

Hala El-Shafie says: Diets set you up to fail; they should be banned. Eat small amounts of the right food. Eat regularly and well. Get moving: exercise helps. Think about why you eat. Accept your body shape and who you are; size 8 (4 US) jeans will not necessarily make you happy.

Yes! But,where I come from, if you’re used to eating whatever, whenever and however much you want, Ms El-Shafie’s approach to not dieting IS dieting. There are about a thousand steps between where I started and where she wants me to be. I’ve been working at this for years and I’m not there yet.

For me this is a “just do this” statement and about as helpful as responding to malfunctioning light switches with, “just rewire the house”.

In my experience, “just do this” statements are used by people who don’t want to share your problem with you. They offer solutions that reflect well on their own behaviour – “Well I could rewire my own house!”. Well bully for you – as my mother would say.

Instead, I favour the “acknowledge how messy life is” response.

Start with figuring out the problem – it might take some time.
Then think of little tiny things that are going to help you climb out of the muck and mire.
Finally – keep trying and making mistakes and falling down and getting dirty and asking friends to help you up. Suddenly you find that things are going generally in the right direction.

There’s no timetable – this might take years or just a few months. I can’t imagine it taking less than a few months. Just be prepared for stretches of hard work and results to be followed by cruising and consolidation as you regroup or just enjoy your success so far.

And while you’re doing all this figuring out, it will probably help to have some tools on hand that other people have devised – maybe Weight Watchers or Nutracheck or a Low GI diet (I’ve never tried that one but it always seemed sensible). As long as we treat them as tools and not religions, they can be helpful rather than harmful.

I’ve also got a collection of books that I dip into when I need encouragement or sometimes I just read through blogs of people who are also figure this food/body/mind thing out.

How do we asses whether or not it’s working? I think the only way is to think back to the beginning of the process.

Am I further ahead than I was 30 years ago. Yes – by many many many steps.

What about 2 years ago? I’ve learned SO much about myself in this process since I started dropping down from 170lbs.

What about last month? No- I haven’t made much progress for a couple of months. I guess it’s time to push forward again.

What does “push forward” mean in this part of the journey? It means getting the last few pounds off and starting the “forever” process with maintenance. Can’t say I feel particularly psyched. My stomach bothers me every day and I find myself eating what I think will make me feel better. I need to be more mindful about what does make me feel better and construct a plan around that.

OK – This life has huge capacity for “Day 1′s” and this is yet another of them. Losing another half stone (7lbs) can’t make my health worse and it just might make it a bit better. So here goes.

And the point of all this was…what, exactly???

Thoughts on the Process 1 Response »

Feb 132010

Friday night: After a whole year of work, 2080 “official” hours, and countless late nights and weekend hours, the results are in. I suck at my job. It isn’t enough that I weigh far more than I should, that I have little-to-no self esteem, that I’m floundering in debt, and spending 10 hours a week in a car driving/riding to a job that was moved out from under me, and has changed significantly in the recent past–and not for the better. Now, it turns out that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I did, the best that my boss has to say about the blood, sweat, and tears that I gave for my employer is “needs improvement.” Are you f*cking kidding me? Talk about a slap in the face. For the first time, I’m seriously thinking maybe it is time to start looking for a new job. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I have the confidence to pull that off. But to have my efforts reduced to “needs improvement” is more than I can bear. I worked over my holiday break. I’ve never done that before. And what was the point? Apparently, there wasn’t one. It all feels pointless now. Expectations are apparently so high as to be un-meetable. I’d like to ask my co-workers how they did, but finding out that they scored better would only make it worse, when what I really want is to find out that they suck too. Then I’ll know for certain that it’s a combination of too-high expectations, and a boss who can’t find a way to say, “Good job!” Or is it that I don’t do a “good job?”

I’m going to save this for now, instead of posting it. It seems a little dark for the “Talking It Off” blog. Maybe things will look different tomorrow. One can hope…

Saturday morning: Nope, things don’t look any different yet. My review was unnecessarily harsh. So now what? I was tempted to wallow in depression and food, but that only partly worked. I wallowed in depression, but didn’t have any appropriate food items to dive into. That’s ok though. I curled up in a ball, pouted, felt sorry for myself, and then went to bed. Woke up this morning feeling sorry for myself as well. But then I found a link to the new “We Are The World” video. Watched that, and felt like an ungrateful b*tch. Then I remembered that I have the power to change my attitude, which I promptly did. My plan? For this morning, it’s a weight workout and a walk with my “granddog” who is here while my daughter is at work. Then on to the grocery store to get some produce. And then, home to respond in writing, calmly and professionally, to my boss’s review of my work. I know that she was harsh in giving me a numeric rating. Her words told a different story. Plenty of “willingness to take on additional accounabilities” and “offers help to staff” and “worked over the holiday break” and other things that tell me there’s a disconnect between her words and her numbers. And, in a startling change from previous plans, I will update my resume and venture out into the job market. Can’t hurt. Might help.

In trying to build up my confidence to tackle even a low-key job search, I will start with exercise. I know from previous experience that it works in precisely that way. And exercising is almost pointless if I’m going to continue to not eat well. So effort must be made there. Will this be the trigger to a healthier lifestyle? Will this be the thing that spurs me into more permanent action? I hope so. With the knowledge that I control my attitude, and with constant reminders so I don’t forget, I have a chance. A good one.

There’s the answer to the question in the title of this post. And the point of all this was…what, exactly??? The point is that I am worth far more than others will give me credit for. I am worth the best effort in caring for myself. I am worth a job where people will appreciate the work that I do, and the extra effort I put in, and especially, that I am more than willing to learn from my mistakes, because yes, there were mistakes. So here’s to NOT letting a harsh judgment from someone I know to be difficult to please ruin my day or anything else! Now I’m going to make a donation to the cause in Haiti, since their suffering helped me realize that I don’t have it so bad!

In Praise of Slow Weight Loss

Things to try, Thoughts on the Process 1 Response »

Feb 122010

I’ve been thinking – wondering really – about why this time has been so different. Besides the writing, I think that the biggest difference has been a new “forever” mindset. I’m trying to think of a good analogy to explain what I mean.

In all my previous attempts at weight loss, I was like a person going on a trip. I’d pack a huge suitcase full of expectation. I’d buy a ticket to a certain destination and have a timetable for getting there. But I wouldn’t expect the unexpected and I’d always come home before I got to where I wanted to be because I couldn’t handle the very nature of travelling. “There” remained unexplored and “home” was a place that was ugly but comfortable.

I think middle age has taught me to pack light – ditch the expectations, the presumed destination and the timetable. Home is no longer an option – I sold that house and have taken to the road! This time I’m wandering around the world and I’ll know “there” when I see it.

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t make any money telling people that the best way to lose weight is to aim for an average of about a pound a month. But, with the huge benefit of hindsight, I’m very happy to be 25lbs lighter than I was 25 months ago. If I had repeated my usual on-off-on-off dieting behaviour, I’d certainly weigh more now than I did in January 08.

Maybe I should submit my idea to Carl Honoré and we could launch the “Slow Diet” movement. That’s not such a bad idea.

Results Are Typical – Before & After

Giving up, Thoughts on the Process 2 Responses »

Feb 112010

Well well well – look what I found in our 92-93 photo album.

Every Weight Watchers “Failure Story” (results are typical) must have photographic evidence and here is mine.

BEFORE – early Sept 92 – before quitting Weight Watchers.

AFTER – December 92 – after quitting Weight Watchers – what a difference a few months makes. I have a feeling that I lost a few pounds before I went back to Weight Watchers. It looks like I’ve put on a lot more than 7lbs.

These Results are Typical

Thoughts on the Process 4 Responses »

Feb 112010

So here are some old Weight Watchers cards that represent sixteen weeks of my life when I was thirty-one years old. In North America, WW is legally obliged to attached the words “Results not typical” to their success stories. If WW ever wanted to do a spread of “Failure Stories”, they’d be very welcome to these little documents that have somehow survived three house moves including one to a different continent.

So what did I notice first? The incredible 8 lb loss in the first two weeks. As a WW veteran, I had obviously worn heavy clothes and eaten a big breakfast before my first weigh-in just to make sure that there were some results that first week. Incredible.

The next thing I notice is the goal weight range for my height: 139 – 118. Eighteen years later the range is 150 – 120. I know this has to do with the advent of BMI but, at 150lbs I’m definitely overweight.

And then, at only 9 weeks in, I give up the ghost at 148.5lbs. (10 stone 8.5lbs) I think that’s where I get more comfortable in my own skin. It’s probably where my “small clothes” start fitting. So I quit in September and look what happens next after October, November, December……

I’m guessing the clothes were getting tight and I was feeling uncomfortable in my own skin again. I’d ditched the diet and certainly didn’t believe that I needed to follow the WW guidelines in order to keep the weight off. So I’m up 7 lbs (that significant half a stone, I now know) and clearly not too enthusiastic about doing it all again as I lose 4, skip a week and gain 1 back.

I get my act together for a bit, then after a gain, quit again despite my optimistic goal of 134lbs. (9 stone 8lbs)

Now here’s a public confession. To the best of my knowledge – which may be a bit dodgy – I did that in 1979, 1980 and 1981. I then lost a pile of weight with one of those 500 calorie a day diets supervised at a clinic. I kept the weight off till I had kids then I think I did it again in 1991, 1992, 1993 – moved to England and did it in 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2003.

This may mean that I’m not quite sane – but it’s an insanity that I share with millions of women over the entire world. You see, WW works – that’s why I kept going back – but it only works as long as I do.

So, what finally changed? After thirty years I stopped looking for a quick fix and I stopped looking outward – to a program or a book or a diet – to give me the solution to a lifetime of being overweight. Instead I started looking inward and using the other stuff as tools to help me on my way.

The other day an old friend who I hadn’t seen for ages remarked on how slim I was looking. “What have you been doing?” And for the first time, my answer was not, “Oh you know, the same old Weight Watchers – I’m sure I’ll do it again next year.” (Yes, I really used to say that.) Instead, my answer was, “I’m blogging – writing it all down and getting to grips with why I eat in the first place.” It was the first time I realised that this is my main weight loss tool. I like that.

Faking It

Health, Thoughts on the Process No Responses »

Feb 102010

My long awaited specialist appointment can be summed up in the following conversation:

Me: Can you explain the ultrasound results? My gp said they were unusual.

Doc – with many many years of training: No. We can explain the usual but not the unusual. That’s why it’s unusual.

Ok, thanks. He was actually a good, non-patronising human being but he also wasn’t going to tell me there was nothing to worry about. Instead, and I quote again, he said, “There is both worry and no worry”, which I’m pretty sure translates to, “It could be something; it could be nothing”.

SO. ……my big challenge is to live as though it is nothing, even though that not-so-little-voice is BOOMING in my ear that it bloody well could be fatal. You see my challenge.

So now I’ve said it, I’m going to write as though everything is fine and I will keep doing that until I know something to the contrary. That’s called “Faking It” and it’s not one of my born talents. I prefer blabbing out the truth of the matter even if it’s not warranted in that situation. But this time I’m going to hold it in – or at least express it sparingly and in the right arena.

In the process, I’ve got to get over the feeling that I’m an idiot to concentrate on losing weight if I’ve actually got something seriously wrong. I actually had a conversation with myself at the gym yesterday and came to the conclusion that I should lose weight and get fit ESPECIALLY if I’ve got some physical thing to fight.

Well, another “duh” moment on this journey.

Tomorrow – WW weight loss cards: the story of my life.

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These Results are Typical

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