Could It Really Be That Easy?

This weighing and measuring everything stuff brings nasty surprises every day. Nasty in the meaning of catching me very very cold at making excuses. 

As it is, I was absolutely convinced that I was not at all overeating. Convinced enough to get into a screaming match with my father after my most spectacular gain. And even when I realized that I must have been having a bit more food than I remembered, even after catching myself with the biiig plates piled high, I thought that these realizations would have made me able to not overeat. 

Add to this that I mostly kept away from sugar and chocolate, and I was once again flabbergasted at regaining half of the weight I had managed to lose. Reading those Paleo books and blogs with their constant refrain of fat not being bad and do not ever start to count calories, you will be automatically stopping eating when you had enough, made me even more confused. The only thing I got from these is a new problem, namely with cravings for fatty food. 

As it was I would have been dead certain that my daily intake was something around 2000 calories a day and that this ought to be maintenance, and that I would easily be able to keep eating a 1000 calorie a day deficit without having to change too many things about my diet.

Boy was I wrong, again. 

My daily intake is really around 2000 calories, now that I try to cut down and stop myself from mindlessly munching. Before that, it might have been anywhere between 3000 and 4000. 

Cutting down to 1000 calories without using meal replacements would probably not work for me. I can be glad if I make a 500 a day deficit. 

And for every single meal or ingredient, I can tentatively assume it is twice as much and has at least twice as many calories than what I would assume. 

Which makes me wonder if all those calorie counters were off in their values. The present one seems to be spot on, if I look at my numbers. 

What pisses me off the most is that even trying very hard to rein in my eating did not prevent this. 

Size 38 Skirt

Not what I am fitting into right now, sadly. My present body size is more like a size 46, which means I can, indeed, buy standard sized clothes. 

But I had all this time wondered why they do not have skirts in the proportion I used to wear any more, namely, slightly below my knees. 

Today I found out why.  Actually, the skirts still have the same length. I saw a size 38 skirt today  that was proportioned exactly the way I remembered my pencil skirts from 63 kilogram times. 

Besides that they had the same skirt in a size 50. They were the exact same length. But the size 50 one was simply wider than long. To think that a size 50 would, at my top weight, not have fit me any more...

One more reason to keep up counting those calories. 

Eff stands for frustration

While the heat wave has been slowly ebbing off, the water retention that came with it hasn´t. 

Quite the contrary. I have been having trouble with my circulation since last week, and my weight has been, during that week, gone up by some 300 grams ( that´s 0,7 pounds) A DAY. Every effing day. 

Which catapults me back to a point I last saw almost two years ago. 84.7 kilograms, 186 pounds. 

No, I haven´t overeaten. I stuck to around 2000 calories a day. Mostly, below. No way I could have overeaten by 2100 calories a day. Still, I am ballooning up like a piece of yeast dough. 

We went to see MIL over the weekend, and she immediately asked me whether I had noticed that I had grown fatter since she last saw me. It took all of my self-control not to scream at her. Instead, I bit my lip and then told her calmly that I am still weighing myself every day and yes, I know perfectly well that I have regained so there is no need for her to alert me to the fact. 

As if I could miss what is happening. My clothes fit tighter, my rings are once more cutting into my fingers, and I am feeling the old aches creep back. Knees, ankles, spine. 

But even if it was true, what pissed me off was that the old lady felt the need to address the obvious at all. 

To me, having someone talk to me about gaining weight always feels like an attack. It probably is what growing up with parents who wanted me to lose weight when I had a BMI 21 will do. The strength of my anger flaring up at being taken to task over my weight was, in any case, bigger than what the old lady would have deserved. 

But, apart the anger over that scene, I am still scared. Badly. If this were to continue, I would be back in the bigger clothes sizes in a matter of weeks. 

What scares me most is that I honestly don´t know what is propelling my weight upwards. 

It almost feels as if that body of mine were taunting me. Do what you want, you are still stuck within me and I do as I please. 

The only hope I have is that this really is all water retention. Maybe I´ll pick up a diuretic at the pharmacy tonight. If that doesn´t help, there´s something else wrong. 

Sometimes life sucks.

Julia

Next stop, real food

DH arrived back last night, so I shared, after a day of protein shakes, his dinner. For me, that meant two cups of lowfat yoghurt with chopped almonds and unsweetened cocoa powder, four stick salamis (about 50 calories apiece) and a finger-sized piece of cheese, plus a glass of beer. 

This morning, 81.9 kilos, so, up 100 grams. But that might be from the salt in the salamis. 

As DH's business trip had taken him to Bavaria, he'd brought some of their good wheat ale. As the basement still is dripping wet, storing that in the cellar was out of the question so it had to be carried up four flights of stairs (there's no elevator). 

Dragging that crate upstairs, I once more wondered how on earth I had gotten myself up those same stairs at thirty kilos more. 

Yesterday, I carried that crate upstairs, without having to pull myself up by the handrail, and without having to pause. Both of which would have been impossible at my top weight, even without carrying anything. 

Just so I won't forget why I am doing this...

Julia

Overfed and undernourished

When I was recondensing myself, I was careful to consume enough protein and regularly taking my supplements ( vitamins and minerals). I felt reasonably good. Most importantly I was barely tired. 

Slacking off in those two respects was probably what made the fatigue come back, big time. 

At least that's what I suspect. I had several protein shakes yesterday and started on a high-dosage vitamin/mineral regimen to fill up my depleted stores. Guess what, I am, this morning, for the first time in ages, not tired. I slept like a baby for six and a half hours, thankfully uninterrupted by any emergency calls, woke up half an hour before the alarm went off, and am sitting here more alert than I had been in months. 

I am also down 0.8 kilograms. Todays WI: 82.2 kgs or 180.8 pounds. 

Still a pound above morbid obesity, but I intend to keep up the protein fast for the next days. Perhaps I'll be able to undo some of the damages that way.

I sometimes wonder if the fact that I have always hated my body has something to do with how often I simply forget to properly feed it. Drinking my water. Eating my protein. Taking my vitamins and minerals. It ought to be easy. But what happens regularly is that I start doing it, keep it up for a little while, and then forget to do it. Treating my body well is not something I am in the habit of doing. 

I prefer being able to ignore it as completely as possible, thank you very much. Which also explains my aversion to intentional exercise. 

The problem with that is that neglecting my body usually ends up making the demands of said body louder, causing all kinds of annoying symptoms like fatigue. 

So, I should better get in the habit of taking regular care of the things my body needs. 

After all, it and me will, statistically, have to get along another thirty or forty years. And keeping it well-nourished might just make it a bit more comfortable to live in. 

Julia

Over again

The last weeks, weight-wise, were absolute desaster for me. The curve indicating my weight on FatWatch has turned into an almost vertical rise that has catapulted me back to about where I was at the beginning of last year. 

Highest point reached regaining:83.8 kilograms. 184 pounds. 

This morning's weight: 83.0 kilos, 182.6 pounds.

The most vexing part being that the rapid rise came after things ought to have been back to normal after the flooding in June. Not while we were off plan due to being unable to cool, wash or cook fresh food. Which either means that the results of that week were taking time to materialize, or I didn't get back on the wagon asap. 

Most likely, it's the latter. 

If mentally kicking oneself counted as exercise I might have an easier time getting the regain off again. 

Four point six kilos up from the lowest point last year in May. 10.12 pounds. 

The seventh part of what I had recondensed. 

If I had needed a reminder ( obviously, I did ) that I cannot must not may not ever return to eating the things I used to eat, this is it. It had taken me almost two years to get down there. Losing, statistically, fifteen weeks worth of distance already covered to being less careful for one year and just one month of not being careful at all goes a long way towards demonstrating just how fast the other sixty pounds might be back. 

So, back onto the rails. 

As DH is out of town once more, I have started doing a protein fast, with nothing but protein shakes for the next three days minimum. Not a sustainable way of living, but the point is that I must get off carbs again. 

I'll be posting my daily weigh-in results to keep myself accountable. 

The one thing I want to regain is the ground I lost this year. Being halfway through it already, that may mean I won't be able to reach my goal by next March any more. But I keep trying. 

Julia

Never out of the woods

For the longest time, I had been getting along without consuming cookies, bread, or sweets. If I did have some, say, at MIL's, I was able to stop eating after consuming just one slice, or one piece, without having cravings for more. 

I had been certain that I could, by now, handle that stuff. 

I was wrong. 

That week of enforced feeding on carbohydrate-rich foods has been wreaking havoc on my self-control. 

For one, I am almost continuously hungry. Even worse, I crave carbohydrates, to a point where I gave in and bought a big tin of chocolate cookies. Not only that I ate most of these over the course of the last week, yesterday I had a veritable binge for the first time in years. One of the kind where I keep going in and out of the kitchen, returning for another handful or bowlful of food as soon as I finish the preceeding one in spite of my stomach already feeling uncomfortably full. 

What saved me from an even bigger caloric desaster was the fact that my former favorite binge foods were not in the house.   

The whole thing has been scaring me, badly.

I can still remember what it felt like, many years ago, to be stuffing my face with two pounds of spaghetti aglio e olio, while begging my boyfriend to take me away from the house because I could not stop eating, or that other night when, after scouring my pantry for the literally last crumbs of dry cereal, I drove my car ten miles to the next McDonald's (tm) drive-in and bought twenty of their standard hamburgers, and began wolfing them down in the car while driving, dripping ketchup and grease all over me and having finished off half that giant bag of food by the time I came home. 

In that kind of situation, it is no longer about willpower, because that just got short-circuited. The only chance I have of interrupting that kind of binge, other than reaching the point where I literally can't get any food into my body any more, is physically removing myself from food. 

Re-experiencing that kind of out-of-control food craving is scary. 

If I don't stop this fast, I will regain, big time. 

I had not thought that the effect of eating sugar and wheat several days in a row and in larger amounts would be so drastic. 

Obviously, it is. I am acting like a dry alcoholic who has been made to down a bottle of something 80proof and ends up craving alcohol as if he'd never been dry. 

Which is probably the lesson for me in this. My body doesn't react normally to wheat and sugar. If I consume more than a minuscule amount of either, the cravings for crap food I thought were gone come back full force. And I, especially when there are other stressors around, may not be able to resist them. 

So, what I need to do is detox again. Go cold turkey on anything wheat and sugar. Fill up on real food. 

If I don't, I'll be back where I never again want to be. 

Todays WI: 83.3 kilograms. 183 pounds. 

Again.

And I never wanted to be back up there, either.

Back in morbid obesity.

High time to pick myself up and get back on the tracks. 

Julia

May Day

Today is a legal holiday where I live, so I'm staying at home.
Yesterday's grocery run was quite a success, with a giant pack of pork schnitzels ( unbreaded) on sale which will make five meals' worth of meat. Two of them I put on the new ceramic grill for last night's dinner, and the rest went, bagged up in twos, into the freezer.
That grill promises to be one of the better investments in cooking appliances I made of late. That ceramic coating is absolutely non-stick, and after allowing the machine to cool down, wiped clean effortlessly with a wet microfibre cloth.
And the grill has already found its home. When not used, it sits on top of my microwave. Easy to grab and use.
Being able to fry a piece of meat, fish or poultry with no added grease and in less than half the time it would take if I used a pan will make preparing a home-cooked dinner even faster.
Most importantly, as I can clean it with soapy water, too, I can put fish on it without being afraid of everything after that coming out tasting, well, fishy. Which makes it even more versatile than my favourite cast-iron griddle pan. As those must not be cleaned with soapy water, no way I was going to fry fish in it.
Often, the range of our eating is determined by the range of equipment we have. The worst I had was a place where the only equipment was a fridge and a microwave. I ended up eating reheated prefab crap at home and bingeing on fast food when away from home. That underequipped kitchen was one of the things that conspired to get me above morbid obesity for the first time in my life.
Today, I am reasonably well-equipped in my kitchen. But there's still room for improvement. Especially after I removed a lot of things that were clutter.


Julia

There but for fortune...

When I visited the USA with my parents in the late seventies of the last century, I was astonished about the number of people I saw who were decidedly obese. People who were lumbering instead of walking, people who were looking like fifty-year-olds(or what sixteen-year old me thought fifty would look like), but probably were not even thirty. People who were chewing on junk food or inhaling liquid junk food. People who, on top of being fat, were dressed in absolutely tasteless gaudy-colored polyester garments that accentuated their fatness.
Back home in Europe, at that time, true obesity was rare. There were some people who were overweight, mostly older ones, but very few were obese. The kind of obesity I saw in the US was, to us, an American thing.
But then, in Europe, most people lived mainly off unprocessed foods. Most meals were cooked from scratch at home. Fast food restaurants in the American style were few and far between, and visiting them was a rare occurence.

Today, there's at least one of the "American specialty eateries" in every city. Supermarkets have shelves and shelves of processed and prepared food-like substances.Many young people would not know how to cook a meal from scratch if their lives depended on it.
Which they probably do.

When I go to the mall today, or wait at the tram stop, a sizable number of the people I encounter are morbidly obese. The most shocking part being how many of them are relatively young. Sixteen-year olds with quadruple chins that make them look like forty, and who are carrying packages of fast food.
Fifty-year olds who are barely able to walk, or use crutches or electric carts. Women who look as wide as they are tall. Men who take up a whole two-seater bench on the bus.
I cannot help comparing their lumbering, painful gait to that of the normal-weighted persons next to them, or their drawn, downturned mouths to the smiles of their slimmer counterparts.
Been there, been that.
Don't anybody tell me these people are completely happy with what they are.
Because they are not. Not even if they try to hypnotize themselves into it with so-called fat acceptance.

I'm feeling sorry for them. Sorry, and thankful that I have been allowed to find a way out of that prison.

But for fortune, that woman on the cart might have been me. But for fortune, I might still be that woman on crutches.

The most tragic part being that the key to the prison door is within everybody's reach.

Watch your portions.
Don't eat crap.
Eat for fuel not for entertainment.
Don't eat your feelings.
Move your ass.

For most of the obese, following these might mean freedom.

As simple as that.

But, of course, that would require them to own up to the fact that their obesity is not a mysterious curse fallen on them, but mostly the direct result of their own actions.

Owning up to that was the first step for me on the road back to being normal-weighted.

I still have quite a distance to go until there. But the actions that brought me below morbid obesity already should get me there, too. It's just a matter of time and perseverance.


Julia

That's not what I wanted to happen...

I usually try not to be a coward when it comes to Facing Up to Reality.
So, I dug out my bioimpedance scales this morning and, after inserting a fresh battery, stepped on them. The last time I had done so was when I had recondensed by about five kilograms, which brought me for the first time below the limit up from where all that thing would give me was an "error" reading.
Back then, my body fat percentage was 52 per cent, which meant that there were, in total, 55.6 kilos of fat on me.
Since then, my weight has gone down by another 25 kilograms, which I had hoped had brought down the amount of fat, too.
Today's reading: body fat percentage 54 per cent of total weight.
Worse than before.
Which means that I still carry around some 43 kilos of blubber.
Which in turn means that only twelve of those kilograms I was so glad to have recondensed were actually, you know, fat.
And thirteen were something else, which means either water weight or lean tissue, i.e. muscle.

No wonder I'm plateauing. And perpetually exhausted, too.

What this means is that what I have been doing is not working.
I had thought that keeping my protein intake at about thirty per cent of total calories would suffice to prevent loss of lean tissue even without exercise.
Boy was I wrong.

So what to do?

Rebuild that lean tissue, logically.
Which might mean gaining weight before losing any more of it.

At my goal weight, a body fat percentage of, say, twenty would amount to about thirteen kilograms of fat that I would not mind keeping on my body.
Thirteen. Not forty-three.
The other thirty kilograms are what has to go.
Except I am only fifteen kilograms above goal weight, which in turn means I would have to regain fifteen kilograms of lean body mass if I don't want to end up with a BMI below twenty.

So, what I need to do is build muscle without gaining fat.

And without spending inordinate amounts of time on it. I have a life outside of weight loss, after all. A very busy one.

Back to the library for information and back to the drawing board.


Julia

Feeling good in one's skin

Like everybody else on this planet, I have been born into it wearing that contraption of flesh and bones called a body. And ever since, I have felt uncomfortable in the particular specimen I am stuck with, and I have envied people who seemed to be able to generate any pleasant experiences from the fact of having a body. To me, it seemed always preferable not to be reminded of having one.
Living was something I did in my head and with my brain.
Of course, being brought up by two elderly people who, out of fear that something might happen to me, never allowed me outside the house to play, either by myself or with other kids, didn't exactly help. At a time when other children, blissfully unaware of any limitations of their bodies, test their limits and grow the synapses necessary for coordinated and effective movement, I was perpetually confined to a six-room floor plan.
Besides, my grandparents, while loving and well-intentioned, also were rather Victorian in their attitudes. Everything about the human body was considered gross and unmentionable.
And then I entered school.
Being uncoordinated and clumsy for lack of exercise, I was relentlessly bullied, most of all during gym class. Add to that a gym teacher who, in retrospection, obviously did not see what the cause of my klutziness was, and what you got was a deepening conviction on my part that any activity that involved moving my body around was absolutely pointless torture and should best be avoided. Which meant that I spent almost all of my free time indoors, reading.
I have, even when normal-weighted by BMI standards, always had what is called a "stocky"build, which set off another bully in my immediate family who kept calling me fat- though I technically wasn't- and forced me into my first diet at age eight, as if starving my body would remove the klutziness, which of course it didn't. Neither did it change the basic build of my body.

What all that left me with was a solidified case of body hatred, and the conviction that my body was nothing but a perpetual source of shame and discomfort, an obstacle to be dragged around that would meet nothing but revulsion from others.

And that was before I gained over a hundred pounds of excess fat.

In a way, hating my body like that made it easier to be obese. To me, my body had always looked like that. When I first gained all that weight, what I thought was that my body was, for the first time, really looking like what I had believed it looked like all my life. And the physical limitations that came with obesity were, from my twisted point of view, just extensions of the limitations I had perceived even when still slim. That was also why it was so easy to deny them.

Today, I have successfully recondensed about seventy pounds of that excess fat. Enough to come back to a point slightly below, or as slightly above, that limit of obesity.
And for about a year, my weight has been plateauing. Two thirds of the way down achieved, and then stalled.
I have no idea if it is my body trying to get back to some kind of elevated setpoint or my mind playing subconscious tricks on me. What I know is that this is not goal. Not even remotely so.
I don't want the description of the subject, if ever a postmortem were done on me, to read "obese female". Being normal-weighted is the number one item on my bucket list.
But, after trying out most of the recent scientific results on what to eat for weight loss, the only thing left I am not presently doing is.... exercise. Moving my body above what is unavoidable in my daily life.
When I started on my weight loss journey, I was doing two rounds of about forty minutes a day of nordic walking. The action with the walking poles helped with the back problems I had.
Then came winter and weather that was too cold for walking outside. So I quit. When spring came around, I did not restart.
I had so hoped I could get to goal without having to resort to exercise, especially since I was convinced that any weight loss caused solely by exercising would not be maintainable for me.

So, it seems that I won't be able to avoid facing that body of mine after all if I need its cooperation. The problen with that being that I still hate my body. I'm still uncoordinated, and the ravages of obesity on my joints and on my skin have made me even less anticipate any enjoyment from moving it.
It hurts, it jiggles in places where it should not, it is clumsy, and it feels increasingly weak, as if the last, say, ten pounds I lost had been the muscles I had used for dragging around the weight I have already lost.
I have no idea what my body fat percentage is right now. It used to be too high for my bioimpedance scales to measure, giving me an "err" reading instead. What I am afraid of is finding out that what I lost would be lean tissue instead of blubber.
I'm not usually so shy about facing the truth.

Whenever I read someone's description of how they enjoy moving their bodies, whenever I read about "positive body image", all I can feel is envy of people who can generate enjoyment from their bodies, and resignation at my own inability to do so. The worst part of it all being the knowledge that I was probably born with that ability and lost it somewhere along the way. I haven't yet found a way to reclaim it.

Perhaps I should just pretend. Act as if I knew how to perceive moving my body as a thing to be enjoyed instead of a chore to be avoided. Others have managed it.

And then I would have to find the time for doing some exercise.
And pick one to do regularly.

The problem being that my schedule of late has been so irregular that I am glad if I manage to get six hours of sleep in. Making time for an hour of exercise (counting in the time to shower afterwards) will require some major tweaking of my timetable.

And, as walking or nordic walking are about the only kinds of exercise I know how to do at all which require neither equipment nor participation in a group activity, and right now we have ten inches of snow and sub-freezing temperatures, I have some time to make those tweaks before I can start again.

If only my knee-jerk reaction to the proposition of exercise weren't so much like that to the proposition of having a tooth pulled without anesthesia.

Actually, I'd probably prefer the tooth.

Being stuck with a body that requires regular maintenance beyond feeding, cleaning and sleep sometimes sucks. Big time.


Julia

Crossing the river

It's just one month till christmas, and I am determined to be out of morbid obesity again before having to face those opulent dinners that invariably come with that holiday. So, I have been sticking to below 1500 calories a day for about a week now, and I am beginning to see results. This morning, the scale showed me a weight below that dreaded point of obesity for the first time in several months. What with the wild fluctuations I had lately, that doesn't mean I am out of obesity yet, but it does at least indicate that what I am doing is beginning to work.
Norma has been posting about FOMO and YOLO as obstacles to weight loss. I had to think hard at first what these might mean.
Fear Of Missing Out. You Only Live Once.
I, too, have been guilty of turning these into excuses for overeating.
But what do they really amount to?
There may be situations where FOMO might even be justified.
For me, one such situation came last year when DH took me to the town where he had been studying. They have a cafe there that sells what just might be the best cakes ever. DH had been rhapsodizing them ever since we met, so, visiting that town meant visiting that cafe. We haven't been to that place together before, and we are not likely to get back there within the next, say, twenty years. In that case, I would have missed out on my only chance of tasting those cakes.So, I did indulge myself, and that indulgence had little effect on my overall weight because it happened only once.
But if, say, DH were buying himself a box of frosted donuts at the supermarket, FOMO would in no way be justified. They sold those things yesterday, they will sell them tomorrow, so I would be able to eat some as often as I wished.
And that is the point where the line must be drawn. Only if it is really something that you will never again be able to eat if you don't eat it right now, can FOMO be a valid reason to eat something that would be off-limits otherwise. The point being the word never. If it is something that comes around every year, like stollen for christmas, I can either plan for it, or feel secure in the knowledge that if I decide to forgo it this year, there'll be another one just like it next year. Either way, FOMO should not be the reason behind the decision made about eating or not eating something that is not on your plan.
Most of all, even if I am deciding not to miss out on a particulat taste experience right now, that must not mean letting go of all the brakes. Two pieces of stollen happen to taste exactly like one piece of stollen, so all you could possibly miss out on by having just one is the feeling of an overstuffed stomach and the calories in that second piece.

And YOLO? I don't ever again want to be third-degree morbidly obese, because I have just that one life to live and that one body I am stuck with.And I know by now that I have been missing out on plenty of things when obese that would have been a lot more enjoyable than anything I might eat.
If I think of that, FOMO and YOLO could just be the reasons I need to stick to my plan this time.



Julia

Recondensing is frugal!

Ever so often, there's another flurry of articles published about how obesity is rampant in the poorer segments of society.
Regardless of the veracity of such statements, what irks me about that kind of story is that many people will automatically jump to the conclusion that losing weight has to be an expensive undertaking. And those who are in a financial pinch already could go on to resign themselves to the conclusion that they cannot financially afford to try to lose their excess weight.
Guess what, they are wrong. Completely wrong.
Let's start with food.
Yes, most fattening foods are cheap, while the things touted as " healthy" often come with a heftier price tag.
But an obese person has a much higher basal metabolic rate than a slim one. To put it simply, maintaining twice the weight requires twice as much calories.
Allan of Almost Gastric Bypass has in the past given several vivid accounts of what amounts of food it took to maintain his former girth.
Which means that if you chose to buy non-fattening foods such as vegetables or lean meat, and buy only as much of them in terms of calories as your basal metabolic rate as a slim person would require, you will, for one, lose weight until you are that slim person. And from a point of frugality- you will probably end up spending a lot less on food if you prepare your own nutritious meals from scratch from quality ingredients than if you feed at Mickey D's regularly.
All bets are off, of course, if you go for these ready-to-eat Lean cuisine (tm) meal trays or their ilk. That stuff is expensive. But it's expensive because you pay for the preparation and for the profits of the producers who know that they have an audience of people who are desperate and would pay anything to get rid of their excess weight. While their products, if the nutritional values are right, are not scams, you still end up paying a lot of money for the convenience of using them. So, if money's tight, don't use those products. Find out what healthy nutrition is (shouldn't be too difficult since you obviously have internet access if you read this) and prepare your own food.

Savings potential: From my own experience, by conscious shopping and sticking to the portions slim me would need, about fifty percent of my former food budget. YMMV, of course.

Another place to save is your wardrobe. As a fat person, I was forced to buy new pants about every two months because the material between my legs rubbed through that fast. I also had to keep replacing blouses, shirts, and coats that got torn because they had become too small,or because they got caught on some obstacle course (as in restaurant or even shop) that I was too fat to navigate without bumping into things. Shoes bore my weight only for a short time before giving out. When I started recondensing, of course, there was the initial investment in a set of smaller clothes. But, for one, they came a lot cheaper at a standard clothes store than what the same garments would have cost me in a plus size, and for seconds- I have, in over one year, not have had to retire a single garment due to being worn out, so, I get several times the wear out of a garment, too.

Savings potential:May depend on whether your taste in clothes changes when you become slimmer. If you keep wearing similar garments in your smaller size to what you wore when big, halving your clothes budget is entirely possible ( don't forget the cost of the retail therapy you probably won't need any more when you're more satisfied with your body).

And for the rest? Don't get me started on the extra gasoline you need to move a bigger body, or about the price of things that need replacing when there is an obese person in the house (toilet seats, anyone?).The part about the medical costs has been brought up too often already.

Losing excess body weight isn't expensive. Being fat and staying that way is.



Julia

Tubby revelation

It's been cold and wet over here during the last days, which meant a flare-up of my back and leg pain, probably from my muscles cramping up with the cold. So I decided to do something unusual and take a hot bath yesterday.
Now this is unusual because I had stopped bathing several years ago. Not what you think, I do of course shower daily, but that bathtub.... I had stopped using it after a particularly humiliating experience of being wedged in there so tightly that I had to call for DH to help extract me from it. Plain and simple, I had become too fat to use that tub. So I didn't.
Those sore muscles yesterday made me rethink that decision. After all, I'm down five clothes sizes from that day of humiliation.
Guess what, I'm also down one bathtub size- not only did I fit in there, I had several inches of wiggle room on either side. Comparing that to the memory of that beached whale stuck in the same tub fighting to extract myself from it sure brought home how far I have come since that day.
So it wasn't just the hot, fragrant water I enjoyed, but also a major NSV.
Which helped the soreness and upped the motivation.



Julia

Flat line

That´s what my weight curve has been looking now for more than four months, on average. Not that the daily weights were all the same- they were, within a total range of about four kilograms, all over the place, acually, with the lowest and the highest values just days apart.
Seeing that kind of spikes is quite scary, actually, especially since they definitely didn´t correspond with any major dietary indiscretions.
Then again, if I look at the data I have from past years, I can see a pattern of my weight going up or at least plateauing whenever outside temperatures go up. As I am not even very hungry when it´s hot, drink absolutely no soda, and haven´t had an ice cream for about two years, the connection cannot be in what I eat, but rather in what I keep inside in the way of water retention.
Every autumn, my weight has been going down again. So I guess I´ll have to wait for autumn...
But looking up that data also reminded me of something rather positive. I am, today, 22 pounds  lighter than I was in 2011 on the same day, and 60 pounds lighter than in 2010. From my all-time highest weight, it´s down 68.2 pounds as per today. Add to that the at least two pounds of water I´m retaining due to the heat, and you get, essentially, a maintain.
Mind you, I still have to watch what I eat, keep my carbs low, and never ever take a dive into the sugar box, whatever carby treat it may contain. But then, the ability to climb all three stairs to our apartment without pausing, or run for the bus, or walk through the city without needing a crutch to lean on, is so much better than anything sweet.
I mustn´t ever forget that, or I´ll end up what Norma calls a trainwreck, in other words, part of those sad statistics that the size acceptance people use to bolster their claim that it is impossible to lose weight and keep it off in the long term.
I don´t think it´s impossible, provided you learn from your experience while losing. And provided you accept reality. For me, reality is that something like "intuitive eating" will never work for me, because my regulatory mechanisms- if there is such a thing- have broken down completely many years ago. So, I just cannot trust my body to tell me what it needs. Reality, for me, also means accepting that my hunger and satiety signals are, for the most part, not working at all. So, I can´t trust my body to tell me when it´s full, either.
What I can do is watch my portions. That has, over time,become easier by the acquisition of some new, smaller bowls and plates, which hold just what is the right portion for me, and by sticking to the iron rule of never ever eating anything directly out of the package, but putting it into a dish first, and then- no seconds. Ever.
And no fiddling around with what has worked for me in the past. If I deviate from my plan, I pay for it in added weight. If I do that often, I´ll regain. As simple as that.
And still so hard to get for many of us out there.


Julia

Sizing up a new (old) me

I have been morbidly obese for over twenty years. The last time I wasn´t was when I came freshly from the university, starting my career. As anyone can guess from this, I have, for almost all of my professional life, been wearing clothes that were primarily intended to make me look and feel less ginormous than I was (and failed miserably at their task).
 And I have, also for all of my professional life, thought of myself as big.
As I work in a position where I have to exert some professional authority, and work with a lot of male clients, too, being big was in a way even an advantage. Being weighty made my arguments more weighty, too, and it gave me a kind of gender-neutrality that I found rather helpful sometimes. At least, I didn´t have to deal with clients trying to flirt with me, I was just not coming across as "female" enough for anyone to try.
The layers of fat, thus, even did some good.
Now that I have recondensed more than half of them and am no longer obese, my fat armour, too, has melted off, leaving exposed- what?
As summer is approaching, I have been finding myself without any fitting summer jackets left. The ones I used to wear have been decluttered, having become five to six sizes too big by now.
So, I have been, for some days, on the prowl for a well-fitting, professional-looking jacket to take me through this summer.
I know by now the new size I need. Taking a garment in that size off the rack still makes me do a double-take because it seems so incredible that I should really fit in there- they look so small!
So do I when I stand in front of the dressing room mirror wearing them.
It makes me feel a bit disoriented, actually.
Having the sturdy, big matron I had turned into gone, and seeing instead the body of the university student I used to be, ages ago, plus the changes these same ages have wrought on me.
If there´s one thing that´s clear to me it´s that I would make a complete fool of myself were I still to dress the way that university student did.
But the "big matron" style with lots of navy blue and black doesn´t suit the reemerged me any more, either.
So, I will have to reinvent myself in this smaller size, finding a style of dress that makes me look neither like a hen playing chicken nor like my own grandmother.
It seems like the price of weight loss success is having to find out plenty of things about what was hidden under the fat, too.


Julia

Great expectations vs.baby steps

It´s the beginning of the year again, and magazine stands are full of glossy magazines with title stories of "ultimate diets" promising losses of ten pounds or more in ten days.
If I were to bet on the outcomes of all the people who try out these, I´d probably come out on the side of a sure win were I to bet on them- not losing ten pounds to begin with, -regaining more than they had lost in the first place after going off those diets again.
Actually, the bogosity of those claims is pretty much self-evident if you do a little number-crunching first.
One pound of fat would be the equivalent of 3500 calories. Ten of them would be 35000 calories.
To lose one pound of fat a day, you would have to create a caloric deficit of 3500 calories.
Now the average daily caloric needs of us sedentary office workers are about 2200 calories a day. Less, even, if like myself you have botched your metabolism with long-term yo-yo dieting.
Which spells out plainly that in order to lose a pound of fat a day, you would have to eat nothing and expend an extra 1300 calories on top of that. Make that two hours of uninterrupted jogging.
Would you do that for ten consecutive days? Of course not, if you want to keep functioning. When you eat less than your basal metabolic rate, your body starts to digest, not the fat you want to get rid of, but instead the muscles you probably want to keep, and which you need for that two-hour run, too.
Besides, the body´s survival instincts would kick in quickly, making you think of nothing else but when you will be able to eat for the next time.
So, if those diet plans tell you you can eat anything at all and not exercise, what they will allow you to get off your body will, for the most part, be water. If you start out on an eating plan with highly diuretic properties, you may be able to see the scales go down some two or three kilos in a week. But guess what- as soon as you resume normal eating, your poor dehydrated body will quickly fill up its water stores again, bringing those same two or three kilos back within a mere matter of days. Fast loss, fast regain. That these kilos tend to bring along a couple of friends because your body is ravenous to fill its nutritient stores back up, and therefore keeps you eating until you have consumed enough of every nutritient you ran short of, is what keeps, after such a diet, the weight seesaw going in an upward direction. Not exactly what we want.
Still, those numbers on the glossies, impossible as they are, influence how we perceive our own success rates.
There was a study (I forgot where I read it, so no link, sorry) where they asked people about how much weight they expected to lose when on a diet. The average expectation, as far as I remember, was to lose at least two pounds a week.
What happens with that kind of expectations is that we believe to have failed as soon as we lose less than that. All too often, that´s what drives us to retire to the vicinity of the cookie jar and give up the hope of ever getting back to normal weight.
Been there, done that.
Now would you be satisfied to lose just seven tenths of a pound in a week?
Before you raise a wail of "but I´ll stay fat forever then", that´s exactly what I have been losing for one year and five months now, on average. And the most I ever lost in a single week was 2.46 pounds.
You still with me?
Are you ready for some more numbers?
You know what that adds up to, after 73 weeks? Fifty-five pounds, that´s what. Plus of course the nine pounds off my highest recorded weight I had already condensed before getting real serious about this. 
Or, in other numbers, BMI going down from 40 to 30.4.
Morbid obesity stage three down to almost just overweight.
A paltry 0.7 pounds a week is what got me there.
And, of course, patience.
But it can be done.
When you read up in the net about weight loss methods that work, you will probably find a lot of articles that claim that at a BMI higher than 35, or at BMI 40 or more, the only chance to get that off will be bariatric surgery of one kind or another.
To me, that never was an option. First of all, these procedures are not done as often in Europe as in the USA. Besides, they are usually not covered by health insurance, unless the patient is already in a life-threatening condition or severely crippled by that weight. Even at BMI 40, I would, by that standard, not have qualified. And, on a very personal level, the thought of having my bowels cut up and maimed just to lose weight was so revolting that, in my humble opinion, that should always be a last-ditch option. I wasn´t yet in that last ditch when I started to recondense myself.
And I succeded.
The first thing I had to toss, of course, was all those unrealistic expectations about how and how much to lose. No, you don´t need to have your stomach banded or cut up to lose weight, and no, you won´t lose those two pounds a week, much less those ten pounds in ten days. Oh, and no, you don´t have to put in two hours of jogging a day, either. If I excercise, it´s rarely more than thirty minutes at a time, and I´m not even too regular about it. Of course, regular exercise might be helpful, but it´s not the most important part of losing. Watching what you put in your mouth is. And knowing that, if you want the extra pounds to stay off, you´ll have to watch that for the rest of your life, so, the menu plan you chose to lose better be one that you know you will be able to live with for the rest of your life, too.
Which pretty much nixes those "diet" suggestions in the glossies anyway- or would you want to eat cabbage soup only for the rest of your life? Nothing against cabbage soup there, it can be delicious when well seasoned, but I for one would refuse to make that my one and only meal if I could avoid it.
Sustainability is the buzzword here. In my experience, a way of eating where you are not allowed to eat your favorite foods isn´t sustainable. What if your favorite is pizza, or chocolate cake? I have had these too, during those one and a half years. In controlled portions. And that´s what kept me from going for the whole cake at once. Plus the knowledge that, if I do slip up, I can get back on the wagon the very next day. It´s the long-time results I´m after, after all, and, if I say so myself, my long-time results show that I must have been doing something right.
Yes, it´s just baby steps of 0.7 pounds a week. But they got me where I am today, to a place I had, to tell the truth, almost given up hope I could ever return to.

And baby steps can get you  to the place you want to be. Just because one isn´t Usain Bolt doesn´t mean one won´t be able to walk, not run, those 100 meters, even if one has to use a walker to do so. For almost everybody, there is some kind of baby step you can do to deal with your biggest problem, be it weight or something else.
Just take that step, and remember that even a small step brings you closer to where you want to go.

Julia

It pays to watch

For many years, the ups and downs of my weight were, to me, looking like the results of throwing dice- random and frustrating. Many were the days when I would have sworn by all the deities that I hadn´t overeaten, only to find my weight up by several pounds the next day. Less often, I thought I´d goofed, but weight numbers didn´t tell at all.
What that gave me was a feeling of having totally no control over my body. How else to explain weight gains that did not compute with what I´d eaten? As in overeating by one thousand calories, say, and gaining two pounds which would mean seven thousand calories if it were fat?
For a long time, the sheer helplessness of facing what looked like a totally randomized response pattern stopped me from even trying to recondense my excess baggage. I suffered from the effects of dragging around those 100 extra pounds, but I had no idea how to get rid of them. The only thing I knew was that the diets I had tried out until then had not helped. Quite the opposite. They only made me feel worse because, heck, one was supposed to lose weight when sticking to them, and I sometimes even gained.
The fallacy I´d fallen victim to, of course, was that a calorie is a calorie no matter where it comes from. Only when I started tracking how much of the macronutritients I ate did I see that there was indeed a predictable pattern to my gains and losses, one that depended on the ratio of carbohydrate calories to protein and fat calories. In other words, my weight  follows my carbohydrate intake. Many carbs, even if I stay under my daily calories, mean the scale goes up on the next day, and few carbs mean a maintain or a loss.
I´m not going on a soapbox here, but cutting down carbs is what worked for me. It also worked for DH, who has, just by eating the same things I eat, gotten down two pants sizes since May. So, in our totally non-randomized two-subjects study, we have found that keeping our carbohydrate intake below 30 percent on most days has enabled us to condense weight that, with more carbohydrate-loaden diets, no amount of caloric restriction short of starving ourselves would have moved.
This weekend, I put the counter-check to this into practice. We did, for the third Sunday in Advent, have some mulled wine, some lebkuchen with a cup of hot cinnamon chocolate, and dinner was a big portion of spinach-and-feta lasagna. In the end, I had about twice the carbs I eat ordinarily. And this morning, I predictably found myself up two pounds (not what the lasagna weighed).
While any gain is not exactly a reason for joy when you´re as close to an intermediary goal as I am right now (I absolutely want to be below the limit of morbid obesity before Christmas), I know this time that the nominal gain of two pounds is less than three ounces of fat, maximum,  and the rest is water retention from eating those carbs, plus what I still have inside me of the food I ate yesterday. So, today, I´ll cut waaay down on the carbs, drink a lot of water, and go back on plan in general. And that will be a lot easier now that I don´t have to feel I´m missing out on all the season´s goodies this year.
Besides, when looking at where those carbs came from, I could even see that the lasagna accounted for half of them, so if I had had either lasagna or lebkuchen and hot chocolate, not both, I´d even have stayed on plan. As I said before, I may eat every food, just not everything at once, and in moderation. After all, this has to be for life, because if I went back to what I always did I´d be back having what I always had real fast.


Julia

Off the lists

For many years, I have more or less faithfully kept a running list of what I saw on the scale. I expanded that by adding the data from some even older weighing lists, and I do, by now, have a rather complete set of data back to May 2002, plus several fragments from 1992, 1990 and earlier, back to high school and the time before my weight struggle started in earnest.
What these lists tell is a classic story of how yo-yo dieting plus plenty of diverse stressors in my life plus my several bouts with binge eating disorder turned a small weight problem (medically, actually a non-existent one) into morbid obesity stage three.
What they also show is the times I quit journalling my weight, and the fact that these, of all times, should have been where I should not have closed my eyes to what was happening. Every gap in those lists corresponds to one of the major gains that ended up putting me at 110 pounds above my starting weight.
It wasn´t as if I hadn´t tried to reverse what was happening. Several times, I managed to get rid of some ten or fifteen kilos (20 to 30 pounds), only to regain them faster than they had come off, and then some.
I sometimes regret not having the complete data for all those years. There might have been some interesting things to be found out by analyzing that.
But what I can do is look at those lists and find out how long ago it was that my body weighed what it weighs today.
Er, that must be "what I could do". As per this morning´s weigh-in I have officially entered the uncharted areas, meaning that I do not have the data to tell when I last weighed what I weigh today. The only thing I can tell is that it must have been sometime around the beginning of 2002, which means that I am, right now, enjoying the body feeling I had for the last time a full decade ago . The next recorded data, apart one single glaring number from when I first went up to the 220s in 1992, will be from the eighties of the last century, from the time when I first went from normal to overweight. So, if ever I get there I´ll know that I haven´t been there since the days of shoulder pads and teased hairdos.
I have been morbidly obese for almost ten uninterrupted years.With every pound I lose, and with every ability that comes back, as in walking without crutches or putting on my own stockings, I realize how much these years have cost me in terms of quality of life, and I appreciate those abilities perhaps a lot more than someone who never lost them. I might have stayed inside that fat prison for life, missing out on many things that give joy, and suffering from ever more limitations.
I´m grateful that I have come out of it thus far, and I know that I will have to stay vigilant for the rest of my life to avoid sliding back.
And now, I am going for the limit of morbid obesity. It´s less than three pounds away!


Julia

Old silhouettes and ancient hurts

The de-boxing project being in full progress, I attacked another box yesterday. In one of the drawers I found a small packet of photographs of myself, all of them more than twenty years old and therefore pre-dating my weight gain. I had stashed them away in there and almost forgotten about their existence.
Of course, before finding a new home for them, I looked through them.
Now, when I try to remember what I felt about my body back then, what comes to mind is the feeling of shame about it. I was totally convinced that I was looking grotesque and fat, courtesy, mostly, of that relative of mine who kept trying to force me to lose weight in order to conform to what he thought I should look like.
That insecurity is evident in those pictures in the way I stand.
What is also evident when I look at these pictures today is that back then there was no factual base whatsoever for anybody to call me fat. The pictures show a young woman with a narrow waist and curves in all the right places, a slender neck and face, and hips that were narrow enough to wear a size S pencil skirt over them.
The person in these pictures is slim. BMI 23 slim, so, normal-weighted. Right in the middle of normal.
I don´t know what my relative saw when he looked at me. When looking at those pictures I can´t even imagine what he would have wanted to see that would have satisfied his standards.
What I do know is that, in order to make me conform to said standards, he kept making disparaging remarks about my body, all centered around the theme of "you´re fat, ugly, clumsy, stupid and lazy".
He repeated these often enough to sink down into my own subconscious, making me, not conform to his impossible standards, but instead grow into a bad case of body hatred, insecurity, and general low self-esteem. All of which set me up for a lifelong battle against my body, an eating disorder, becoming a victim of a bullying boss at my first workplace, and several mentally abusive relationships. And for getting as fat in real life as he had made me believe I was back then.

I wish I could go back in time to tell that young woman that her tormentor is wrong, that she isn´t fat. I wish I could somehow spare her from the experiences that her abysmally bad self-image will get her into.
But that isn´t possible.
What is possible for me today is working through the hurt.
I can´t undo my life´s experiences, but I can bring that young woman back from the fat suit she has been imprisoned in for so many years, and then continue to live the life I might have had all the time had I but been able to realize what I, what my body, really was like. A life free of shame.


Julia