Fighting the Internal Tantrum

It’s been 3 and half years since I took an interest in Diet and Nutrition and decided to make big changes in my lifestyle and eating habits.

By the end of 2008 I was at a low point.  I weighed more than I ever had before.  In fact I weighed exactly as much as I had whilst 37 weeks pregnant only without a baby growing in my belly.  I was emotionally and compulsively eating, my biggest danger zones being eating whilst driving and snacking in front of the computer after midnight.  I was sneaking around, throwing out packets and wrappers on the drive home so I wouldn’t be caught having consumed such ridiculous quantities of junk.  I was racing out to the shop to replace packets of corn chips and biscuits to cover up my latest binge. I was out of control and my weight was climbing at an alarming rate.

January 2009 came around and I was so totally over being fat and miserable. I knew I needed to make changes (big ones!) and so I started researching healthy diet and lifestyle.  I joined the gym and started slowly improving my eating.

Here’s a brief overview of the kinds of things I was doing wrong:

• Skipping breakfast 4 out of 7 days
• Eating a McDonald’s breakfast on the way to drop the kids off at school on the other 3 days
• No set lunch just endless snacking on crap from mid-morning right through until the kids bath time
• If I did eat lunch it was normally take-out and it was usually whilst driving, possibly not until I was on my way to pick the kids up from school at around 2:30pm
• I’d eat some kind of baked good (and not the kind I baked myself, think 7-11 donuts and a whole packet of chocolate biscuits) at least twice a day, normally more
• I ate large quantities of pasta or white breads at least once a day
• Vegetables were only ever incidental (the onion on my pizza counts, right? That burger had two whole pieces of tomato on it…)
• The worst time of day was after 11pm, when I’d begin snacking and continue right on through until 2 or 3am
• I drank zero water.  Unless you want to count the water I made my coffee with then it’s zip, zilch, nothing!  On Friday night’s I’d have dinner at my Mum’s and drink her bottled water so Friday’s I probably managed 800mL’s
• Walking was incidental, yes I’d do that thing where you park a long way from the entrance to the shops so you’re forced to walk but that was the total sum of my exercise on any given day

The sad thing is that I was feeding the kids mostly nutritious food yet I stuffed myself with sugar and empty calories all day long.  I served the kids vegetables with their dinner every night and often at lunch time yet I very rarely ate any myself.  I’d pester the kids to drink more water but I drank none.  I wouldn’t let the kids eat too much sugar yet I stuffed my face with it on car journey’s several times a day.  I made the kids go into the back yard to play during the day so they’re run around and get some exercise yet I sat in front of my computer screen all day, every day not moving at all.  Craziness!

Why am I fighting the internal tantrum of late and needed to come here to vent?  I’m feeling a bit shitty and down because I’ve made so many changes over the past 3 and a half years yet I step on the scales each morning to find myself not far off my starting weight (5kg’s lower most days but the number creeps up regularly).  It makes me mad.  Mad at myself for having tiny slips every now and then that somehow add up to the same weight gain from years gone by.  Mad at my body for being so sensitive to weight gain despite 99% of what I’m eating being really healthy.  Mad because sometimes being angry is all there is left when you’ve tried and failed time and time again and you just want to scream and cry.

I look at the changes I’ve made and whilst on a good day I’m proud, lately it feels so unjust to still be struggling with my weight so many years on.

The permanent changes I’ve made:

• I eat breakfast every morning
• I drink my coffee black and my tea with a tiny splash of milk.  I’m not saying that to be healthy others should drink their tea and coffee this way.  For me I just feel like that’s a huge leap in the right direction from my former life where every morning I made myself a milky coffee with a shot of flavoured syrup (pure sugar) and my tea with milk and two sugars
• Breakfast is either a high fibre cereal or eggs (no toast).  Yes I realise the cereal doesn’t fall under low-carb/paleo but I figure I can cross it off the list when I eventually manage to eat enough veggies that I don’t need the extra fibre in the mornings (baby steps)
• I’ve cut out sugar almost all together.  On birthdays I find it impossible baking a cake without licking the spoon and having a slice.  I’m just not strong enough
• The only baked goods I ever eat are the ones I bake myself.  This doesn’t always equal healthy (think birthday cakes and cheesecake!) but at least I know what I’m eating and once it’s gone I’d have to go to the trouble of making more myself if I want to continue the gorge-fest.  It’s a mentality more than anything.  The old me would eat a donut I bought after filling up the car at the 7-11 and then want more.  I’d go through the next McDonald’s drive through to satiate my sugar craving and then when that was finished the cycle would continue…
• I eat salad/veggies with dinner every night and often with lunch too and they’re served with a healthy piece of meat or eggs, not stuffed onto a white bun with a crappy sauce and greasy burger patty
• Snacks even of the midnight variety are raw nuts and seeds
• I drink at least 1.5 Litres of water every day.  I know I should drink more and most days I do but a bare minimum of 1.5 Litres isn’t anything to scoff at when you compare it to zero
• I don’t drive any more, I walk
• I walk a minimum of 40 minutes on a school day

All these changes yet fighting off the weight gain is such a painful struggle.  Worse is that I lost over 10kg’s and let so much of it creep back on.

I know I could do better.  I know I should do better, but some days it just feels so damn unfair.  I watch people eating ridiculously large portions of crappy fast food and they are no bigger than me.  I watch my own husband diet full on for a measly 6 months and lose all his excess weight.

I know I should just be thrilled for him, but I burn with jealousy.  It eats me up inside and makes me want to shout and scream at the universe.  It makes me want to throw myself on my bed teenager style, kick my legs and bawl my eyes out like the world is falling down around me.

Logically despite still being a fatty I’m sure my insides must be healthier than they once were.  Surely some good must come out of all the things I’ve changed, all the treats I’ve given up.  Right?  Is that enough to make it all worth while?  It certainly doesn’t change that my belly fat puts me at higher risk of heart disease and type II Diabetes.  Eating right but still being overweight certainly doesn’t make my self esteem any higher.

There’s no easy solution here.  I’ll keep plodding on, trying not to slip when one of the kids brings home a snack size pack of oreos from a party bag at school and offers me one.  I’ll try and make even more changes (though at this point I feel like all the quick fixes have been done and only the nit-picking like drinking the full 2 Litres EVERY day are left) but just for the moment it all seems very, very unfair.

Loving the Fatty: Plan of attack

I have embarked on step 2.  Step 1 involved weeks of fighting that voice in my head and replacing, “I’m so hideously fat I shouldn’t be seen in public” with a mantra of, “Love the Fatty, Love the Fatty… for the love of all things chocolate coated…LOVE THE FATTY“.

Step 2 involves buying clothes that fit.  Up until now I’ve worn my old clothes and covered them with a coat or bought ridiculously baggy clothes to try and hide under.

In measuring myself I discovered something yesterday.  I’m an hourglass!  How the heck did that fact manage to elude me for my entire adult life?  I assumed I was a pear because of all my belly/thigh/bum weight.  I suppose the hourglass is starting to become less defined with the extra weight but its nice to know it’s under there somewhere.  I guess this explains how easily I build muscle in my arms and thighs and why my weight always distributes all over my body (which worked out well 5-7kg’s ago but is getting ridiculous now).

Loving the fatty…

My latest and possibly most important weight loss goal.

Here I am a mere 2 kilograms (4.5 pounds) below my starting weight of 85 kilograms (187 pounds), where I started in January 2009.

Just to illustrate my current chunkiness I’ve weighed this much at the end of a pregnancy (scary, huh!?).  I’ve mentioned over the past few months that I feel burnt out, emotionally drained and disheartened by worrying about and failing at weight loss.  It’s reached a point where I’m at a loss where to go from here.  I’m in a downward spiral and honestly I don’t know if my body will stop gaining weight at a certain point or if I’ll just continue to expand until I’m a bed-ridden 40-something year old who’s so morbidly obese I’m an embarrassment to my kids who feel obliged to grit their teeth and bear visiting with me for birthday’s and Christmas’s.

Over the past few days I’ve come to realise how deep seeded my distaste for myself-as-a-fatty actually is.  I knew I didn’t feel at all attractive whilst heavily overweight.  I knew I started to get embarrassed going out in public at a certain point and avoided it at all costs.  I knew I winced at my reflection as I passed by a mirror, but I don’t think I realised how foul and distasteful I find the fatty me.

Part of the problem comes from my obliviousness when I reached this weight last time (December 2008).  In my mind I wasn’t that big but once I’d started losing the weight the proof of how bad it had gotten was immortalised in all the family photos, ick!   I’ve spent 18 months with this embarrassment boiling at how bad my weight had gotten.  All this time spent feeling  ashamed of how ugly I was and so happy not to be that gross any more.  I hate to think how people must have viewed me during that period in my life, those that had met me when I was smaller and saw me balloon out and those that had only ever known me as “the big lady”.

Here I am now, 2kg’s away from my highest weight and I’m gutted.  It’s overwhelmingly depressing.  I have 4 coats (2 winter weight and 2 spring mac’s) that I’ve been alternating between unable to settle on a most flattering for the school run in the morning and afternoon trying to cover up how big I am.  Every time I leave the house I do my best to hide the rolls of fat around my midsection under a coat and after many changes and adjustments I finally leave thinking my disguise is complete.  I then arrive at school and on my way past the rows of classrooms I glance at the walls of windows and watch myself walk by.  It’s so horrendous I can’t help but look back at myself over and over in horror.

So I’m fat.

In my head I stick out like a sore thumb, a roll of toilet paper dropped in a puddle of water, swollen and hideous next to my “normal” counterparts.

It has become my complete obsession.  It’s all I think about before I leave the house and every second until I arrive back home.  In my mind my weight is who I am.  I don’t see anything else.  I see a fat woman reflected in the glass, nothing more.

I find it so loathsome, it’s almost enough to make me sick.

It can’t be okay to really honestly hate yourself that much based on one single aspect of who you are.

I’ve never done anything dangerous to lose weight in the past.  Atkins is the most drastic diet I ever attempted and compared to diet pills, tummy tucks and liposuction it was pretty tame.

Recently I’ve hit rock bottom and I am certain others have felt the same way.  This feeling of desperation.  Feeling like being fat is the worst thing that could ever have happened to me (not flood, famine, homelessness,terminal illness or the death of a loved one).  I’ve begun feeling like losing weight by whatever means necessary  is the only way I can come up for air.  It feels almost painful to think I have to go on being this person (yes fat being all-encompassing) for even one more day.

Even now I’m on the verge of tears just thinking about who I am right now.  Oh the humiliation of being fat.

I’m not stupid.  I know this isn’t right.  I know I’m being irrational.  I KNOW I shouldn’t feel this way, but trying to explain that to my inner voice is no easy feat.

So in the interest of regaining some sanity I’m going to try something drastic.  I don’t mean anything crazy diet related, no surgeries or pills, no starvation or weird and warped food plans.

My weight loss goal…*gulp*:

• Love the Fatty Me!

Oh I know that sounds so very simple but trust me this one is quite possibly the hardest weight related goal I’ve ever set myself.

To stop this internal monologue of, “I’ll start thinking I’m pretty when I’ve lost the weight“, “I’ll feel worthy of love and affection when I’m not so big“, “I’ll make friends when I’m the person I should be (skinny)”…and just love whatever and whoever I am now.

I’m always looking to the future me.

• The future me that is worth something
• The future me that is loveable
• The future me that will fit in with the rest of the world
• The future me that’s not a joke but a likeable human being

In all this time losing weight, maintaining it for a while, gaining, losing, gaining again I never just let myself be.  I was always looking to a better me that I’m not today and its exhausting.  It’s exhausting not being able to like or love yourself until you’ve reached a goal.  A love note written but not signed.  I’ll love me but just NOT YET.

So anyone else out there who’s hating on their less than perfect body.  Join with me in my fight to LOVE THE FATTY!

How goes the crazy lady?

Feeling slightly less nutso, hermit, crazy person this week.  I figure at this rate in another two weeks I may even willingly leave the house and walk among the common people (not that I’m a greater than thou royal snob…I mean common as in akin to ordinary, normal and regular…you know…the people that see and even speak to other human beings on a regular basis…eek!).

I have a confession on the dieting front.  I thought I could do the Atkins/Low Carb thing and passionately believe in the new lifestyle and embrace the changes to my diet as the right thing to do.  I was wrong.  I am still haunted by my previous revelations about healthy life style and food choices.  I still believe in whole foods, cutting back on meat consumption, upping fruit and veg, drinking more water, cutting out bad fats and increasing the good fats, always eating wholemeal/wholegrain (my kids don’t know what white floured baked goods taste like for the most part, they’re going to go nuts on white bread when they’re grown!) and eating a balanced diet…

…so where does that leave me?

Atkins “Induction” and “Ongoing Weight Loss” plans cover the veggie element to a certain extent but you don’t have free rein to eat as many veggies as your heart desires.  Whilst it doesn’t outright say, “go nuts with the oils, butter, mayonnaise, cheese, cream and as much meat as you could possibly squeeze in” that’s pretty much where a person ends up.  Sure the Atkins recipe’s are great and there are a lot of alternatives to food’s we currently eat ultimately we live in a lazy society (or is that just me?).  Now, I’m going to go ahead and make some lazy suggestions for Atkins goers below because ultimately I’m a lazy cow 90% of the time and if I hadn’t found quick, easy, low mess options then this diet would never have worked for me.  However, it’s just not the same as being able to grab a packet of pasta from the grocery shop along with the ingredients for whipping up a yummy sauce to go with it and then sprinkling a generous amount of cheese on top.   There are pasta alternative recipe’s but lets face it, on a busy week day how many of us actually make our own pasta from scratch?   That’s not an alternative that’s extra work.

I was very pleased to discover that Flaxseed Meal is still okay and Flax Muffins are an awesome breaky (I like mine with peanut butter) not to mention they address the whole backed up inevitability that comes with starting on Atkins.  The Flaxseed muffin I’ve been making for months (I found it whilst still calorie counting) is a bariatric-eating recipe made in a mug in the microwave.  It was a super easy recipe, BUT after flipping through my new low-carb bible, (The Low-Carb Gourmet by Karen Barnaby) and swooning over her recipes I read through her info on Flaxseed Meal and its not okay to microwave it!  By microwaving it your nuking out the good stuff.  She has a recipe for flax muffins baked the conventional way so I’ll report back on how they turn out.  You can also make Flaxseed Bread which I haven’t yet tried but has great reviews (honestly when you’ve gone weeks without a slice of toast dripping with butter and in my case a generous slather of vegemite then any bread is going to be orgasmic).

For over a month my standard breakfast (that kept me going until 2pm most days) entailed frying in a little oil either a turkey breast, a beef/pork steak or a few pork sausages.  Then frying a few rashers of bacon and sometimes an egg.  Then I’d balance the plate out with a loosely packed cup of baby spinach leaves, a grilled tomato, a few pitted olives, salad onion and up to half a crunchy cucumber sliced.  My fav sauce was (and still is) a roasted garlic mayonnaise (if you’re low-carbing you really need to read the nutritional table on your flavoured mayo’s, a large percentage of them add a lot more than the “mayo + [blah]” on the label.  If you can find a good one though it will jazz up your meat and salad immensely!).

I of course got completely sick of this (as any sane person would).

Fresh prawns fried in a little butter with garlic and mushrooms plus the aforementioned salad got me through another few weeks and lately I’m just preparing my salad, adding a babybell cheese and deciding randomly which of the meat selection in the fridge I feel like today.

Creamy coleslaw (check the nutritional table for carbs count) and fresh olives (stuffed with anything from garlic cloves to jalapeno peppers) from the deli are a must have.  Jars of roasted red peppers (that’s capsicum for Aussies) in olive oil and pesto’s (basil is my fav) make life much more pleasurable also.

Cream!  I have a cow’s milk protein allergy so honestly I envy any low-carber who can have cheese, cream and butter to their heart’s desire without doing the waiting game on the cramps and the rashes to follow.  Yes I should be using more tofu but I figure that’s another branch I can take when I’m mind numbingly bored with what I’m currently experimenting.  I do have quite a bit of dairy and I’m dealing with the repercussions for now.  I’m glad I went for the blander options at first because adding cream’s and butter in at this stage has jazzed up my meals and made me feel spoilt (like I should be dreading how much weight I’m going to gain after a naughty day…only instead I lose weight….weird).

I’m not perfectly sticking to plan (I’m such a shoddy rule follower) but I’m doing okay.

I’m honestly hoping that if I stick with this until I’ve lost the weight, then maintenance with fruits and grains will satisfy my health concerns.

If not…well at this point I’m just happy to be semi-sticking with something and seeing results and I’ll revisit this niggling concern at a later date.

…misleading weight loss

I’m 74.0kg’s (yay-er-ific!  w00t!)

However I’ve dropped back into mopey London induced sloth state where actually eating seems like a whole lot of un-necessary effort.  Not having milk for coffee for the first 3 days didn’t help a whole lot on the getting out of bed front either.  What? Why didn’t I pop down to the shop and buy some milk you ask? pfft!  You’re clearly unfamiliar with the rules of hermit-like moping!  Sunlight and fresh air are banned, for sure!  Speaking with other adults is frowned upon (self-chatter is encouraged) and anyway, if I had the coffee to partake in I might possibly feel inclined to drag myself out of my doom and gloom state of mind (crazy talk!).

On day three of my coffee hiatus I cracked open a tin of condensed milk and poured that into a cup of coffee.  Needless to say I went on a brief sugar high and I made myself sick eating the remainder of the tin over the next hour or so.

So with the condensed milk in mind and my infrequent meals I am shocked I haven’t stored some yummy fat in all my bodies favourite regions (namely my flabby belly, the top of my arms  and in recent years my ass and thighs).

I’ve jumped back onto the low carb wagon today and I have been fairly low-carb friendly over the past week if we turn a blind eye to the condensed milk incident, the donut and the packet of lollies.  Oh and also I ate 5 strawberries today.  Compared to all those other cheats I’m not really fussed about the strawberries.

I’ve lost another inch off my ass too, which is always welcome!

The bags under my eyes and pasty complexion (topped off by some kick ass zits (if I was in a grosses zit competition that is)) make the smaller ass a little pointless really.

If I know my body (yep its built for World War Three hiding under ground without food to speak of and needing fat stores to live off of indefinitely) then even with good eating for the next week I will probably gain a little.  I’ll brace myself!

Maybe I’ll allow myself to be coaxed out the front door sometime this weekend.   Then again, maybe not?