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.

“Normal” these days for many many women is being on the non-stop pendulum of weight loss and weight gain.  I don’t know very many people who are overweight and happy with who they are.  I also don’t know many people who have taken weight off once and for all.

So abnormal- as in unhealthy – is the new normal.  And when you decide to stop being “normal”, people start to judge.

My friend BFG (Edit!  Ha ha – I mean BFP – not the Big Friendly Giant) has written about her recent experience:

Ok, here’s what I don’t get. When you’re fat, nobody tells you that you are. When you lose weight, people initially encourage you, but then as you succeed with that continued weight loss, they admonish you and feel that they have the right to tell, command, order you to stop. People tell you that your continued efforts to maintain a healthy weight, your new body, your new found passion for health and fitness by being wise about what you eat is tantamount to disordered eating and that you need to stop it.

And THEN those same people spend half an hour chewing your ear off about how fat they feel and how they wish they had your will power. They say things like ‘all things in moderation’ and then post on facebook that they’ve eaten an entire box of chocolates! They tell you off for spending time at the gym and then say things like ‘I’m on a starvation diet for my holiday in 8 weeks’.

Several months ago I wrote about a moment when I realised I didn’t want to be in the “Fat Club” any more.  I saw two pretty, young and fat woman tucking into huge greasy pub meals and I knew it was something I never ever wanted to be part of again.

The next step was to realise that I had the same feelings about the “Diet Club”.   I actually can’t bear to hear about people being “good” or “bad” or “cheating” and I even find it frustrating to hear people talk about their weight loss in terms of a week rather than months or even years.

BFG is right.  People (by which I mean all women everywhere) start off by noticing you’re losing weight.

Then they ask how you’ve done it.

Then they ask how long it’s taken.

If they’re people you see regularly, they will then watch to see you give up and put the weight back on.

I’ve done it myself and even used to explain to people that that’s how I lived.  I remember starting a new job and meeting a tiny office full of colleagues for the first time.  Several of them were going out for a cigarette and asked if I smoked.  Just about the first thing they heard out of my mouth was, “No, I don’t smoke but I’m permanently on a diet.”

And I was in.  The non-smoker was forgiven because she was a serial dieter like the rest of them.  We would never be lacking in things to moan about.

Today my goal is to be the person who eats good tasty food, doesn’t fret over menus, moves as a matter of course, maintains a stable weight and looks slim and healthy without obsessing.  I want to be ABNORMAL even if it leaves me open to criticism by people who are used to seeing me fail.

I sometimes get strange reactions when people find out I’ve been married since my early 20s to the same man and that I have grown up children.  It’s abnormal to be in your 40′s with an empty nest and a silver wedding anniversary behind you.  Sometimes people think we’re lucky to have managed it – as though we have effortlessly glided through married life. I used to have a deep need for people to know how hard it actually was to stay married sometimes but now I’m just happy that we’ve got this far and are still in love.

I want my body/food relationships to be the same. I used to worry that people (women) would like me less if they didn’t know how much I’ve struggled with my weight throughout my life. I still feel this a little – but my goal is to no longer care if people think I’m “lucky” to be middle aged with a nice shape and a healthy weight.

You know – it’s scary to think of not being in the Diet Club – of not having that stuff to talk about endlessly – the instant bond based on failure.  I wonder if it’s possible to just be a “floating member” when social situations require it.  I’m going to pay attention to that this week.

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.