Weight loss, diet, and exercise; some thoughts seven and a half months in.

[xiphias]

As I've mentioned before, Lis and I have been doing Weight Watchers since last September. And, at this point, my body fat percentage about 20%, down from, oh, somewhere around, call it 30 or 35% -- healthy %bodyfat for women, but no so much for men. My waist is about 30 inches, down from 44, and my weight is about 180 or so, down from 235 or so. I'm aiming for 175 or thereabouts; given the "the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time; the last 10% takes the other 90%" metric, I'm expecting this last five to take about the same amount of time as the first fifty-five.

My resting heart rate is around 55 bpm; my resting blood pressure is around 110/68. I can run six miles in an hour, or, at least, make the elliptical machine register that I've moved six miles in one hour. I haven't actually tried, y'know, actually RUNNING in a way that I will GO somewhere outside. But, in theory, I ought to be able to do something vaguely respectable. I can do cartwheels, roundoffs, forward flips, and back rolls. I haven't started really strength training yet, but I use the 30-pound dumbbells for some of the stuff I do, and might consider starting some lifting.

So, what is it like?

I hate it.

Every day, I look at the body I've got now, and I ask myself, "Is having this body really WORTH giving up all the foods you've given up?" I haven't actually GIVEN UP any foods, but I eat them far more infrequently. I used to have two donuts every morning; I now haven't had a donut in WEEKS. And I ask myself -- "which would you rather have?"

Honestly? I'd rather have the donut. I'm not sure why I'm still sticking with this, but, so far, I am.

I feel fatter than I ever did when I was fifty pounds heavier. Seriously. My weight fluctuates a good three or four pounds over the course of a day (that "180 current/175 goal" thing means that I want my AVERAGE to be at 175 -- the scale HAS registered 176 a couple times), but by weighing myself at the same time every morning, I can get a good sense of what's going on. And on days when I've gained a pound, I can SEE it.

183 pounds feels fatter than 235 ever did. Because I basically accepted that that was by body, and that was the way it was, and so what? I worried a little bit about the health effects -- I believe in health at any size, and I know that some people can be perfectly healthy at the weight and bodyfat that I was -- but I'm not one of them. But, while I recognized that I was fat, and would occasionally feel depressed about it, because, when I'm in a depressive mood, I'll use any excuse to be down on myself, on the WHOLE, I didn't FEEL fat.

This? This feels fat. While I appreciate some of the things my new body can do, I'm not used to it. It doesn't feel like MY body, and, as such, I have to evaluate it on a completely different scale. This body? It's five pounds overweight, so it's fat. My old body? Was sixty pounds overweight, and that was just what it was, and okay.

(Lis, by the way, remembers this differently. She says that I was constantly complaining about being fat. I don't know. She might be right FACTUALLY, but that's not what it FEELS like to me right now.)

I'm hungry most of the time. Weight Watchers allows you to eat raw, unprocessed fruits and vegetables without restriction (yes, they have calories, but they're displacing the other things you'd eat, and they are far more filling and they digest slower than fruit or vegetable juices would, for instance). So I'm eating ridiculous amounts of fruit. I'll eat a half-dozen to a dozen apples, oranges, or grapefruit over the course of a day. I'm buying fruit at Costco and eating Costco quantities without sharing many of them with Lis. And I still constantly feel hungry.

And it takes away my first-line defense against the onset of the depressive phase of my bipolar: chocolate or other sweets. When I say that I use chocolate to deal with depression, I'm not being cutesy -- the blood sugar hit of candy actually does provide some temporary symptomatic relief. And now I don't have that tool. I mean, sure, it's a suboptimal tool. It's like using cigarettes to deal with anxiety. It works -- it works WELL -- but only for about fifteen minutes at a hit, and it has serious health side effects.

I resent not being able to eat candy, donuts, cake, and so forth the way I used to. I resent feeling hungry most of the time. I resent having to go to the gym in order to NOT feel hungry -- exercising at a high enough intensity for long enough earns me the ability to eat extra food, and if I maintain cardio for an hour, I can eat about 160% the amount of food I'd otherwise be able to eat that day, which just about leaves me not feeling hungry as much.

And I really don't know if I like this body. I like what it can DO. But I can't tell if it FITS.

And I just don't like being smaller. I'm a short guy. I'm under five and a half feet tall. But, at 235 pounds, nobody really thought of me as small. At 180 pounds, I still have more mass than a lot of people, but, again, as my waist has gone down to about 30 inches, I look a lot smaller.

Nobody TALKS about that stuff. Nobody talks about how you lose weight and your body feels wrong. Nobody talks about how there are emotional benefits to being fat.

Nobody talks about how, while I can still be cheerful at my current weight, I will never again be jolly if I decide to keep this body. Nobody talks about the benefits of looking soft, cuddly, and nonthreatening. I mean, you CAN be aggressively and hostilely big, but I had a body and face that came across as "giant teddy bear", and now I don't.

It is taking a lot of getting used to. I mean, animals still like me, but small children now take a little longer to warm up to me than they used to, and that hurts.

So, yeah.

I always knew that I'd hate a lot of the ways I'd have to change my eating patterns. I knew I'd miss the ease of just getting fast food. And I'd miss fast food itself.

But I hadn't realized how much I'd miss the body that I was deliberately getting rid of.

I don't know. I'm probably going to keep this body, but I honestly am not 100% sure WHY I am. The health benefits and the capability benefits are certainly nice. But, I just don't know.

Comments

[tendyl.livejournal.com]

You've really made me think.  I'm on a similar journey and I don't know if I like it, only that health wise I can't stay where I am.

[rosefox]

This is really powerful. You might want to consider revising it as an essay and shopping it around.

I'm sorry you're having such a hard time. Body changes are difficult and weird.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Meh. The whole point of LiveJournal to me is to write essays HERE. But nobody looks here any more.

[richardf8]

I've lost enough weight in the past six months that I had to assure my rabbi that I wasn't sick.

That being said, I'm not in weight watcher's and wouldn't consider them. I regard your ambivalence above as a side effect of the program. I also cannot think about diet in moral terms.

I'm not monitoring my weight as a primary indicator of my success. I weigh myself no more than once a week. I am doing this to control my diabetes, so my primary indicator is my waking blood sugar. I aim to keep it under 120 mg/dl. Doing so has had the side effect of 4-5" drop in waist size and about 40 pounds lost. If I do something to spike my blood sugar, I will want to have a good walk or a short Precor run to use the sugar while it's in my blood, before it can bond to Hemoglobin, and before my kidneys have to cope with it. I like that I no longer have symptoms of neuropathy. I like that I am able to climb stairs, and steep grades and the like. I don't like the pain of sitting on a butt that is not as well padded as it once was. Have a chronic slight edge of hunger is annoying, but OK.

At some point, I will need to shift from weight loss to maintenance. That seems the most challenging move of all. Losing weight is almost as easy as gaining it. Maintenance demands a balance, which is a harder target to hit than a deficit.

Now on to Chocolate - a single square of Lindt 90% chocolate has a Glycemic load of like 4 - nearly negligible. It has more protein than sugar. But it's a great pick me up when the dysthymia sets in. It has the caffeine and theobromine that make Chocolate effective against dementors. It may be an acquired taste, but once you acquire that taste, there is no going back. Other chocolates that work well are the Endangered Species Black Panther, Theo's darkest.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

To be fair, Weight Watchers has done a lot in the past year or so to change their culture to be un-judgy and to get rid of that overtone that you're talking about. But, nonetheless, it's not easy to change a culture, since cultures and subcultures as made up of people.

The Weight Watchers that Lis and I joined is, we are given to understand, different than the one that predated it, but, nonetheless, the attitudes you're talking about still exist.

[stitchwhich.livejournal.com]

I was doing a (too much) serious calorie-slashing diet before I went to see my dietician. She told me something I found to be true - that carbs tend to make a person hungry. So every once in a while, when I remember, I reach for some lunch meat rather than another orange or bunch of grapes, and lo and behold, my hunger lessens. I'm to eat no less than 80g of protein a day (and no less than 1300 calories, which was a huge raise from what I had been living on.)

Perhaps a protein booster would help? I've grown fond of "Premier Protein" chocolate drinks. Very high in protein, low in calories and carbs.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Having cold cuts in the house helps a LOT. I've also started thinking of jerky as a go-to snack, and have discovered lean-meat jerky sticks, like Vermont Smoke and Cure, and OS Trim. So having those high-protein, no-carb, fairly-low-saturated-fat snacks around has been helpful.

Really high sodium, of course, but sodium isn't a problem for me, so, while it's something other people should consider, it's completely not a thing for me.

And an orange or a bunch of grapes, for me, is nowhere NEAR as bad for me as a candy bar, or even a bagel.

[thebig41.livejournal.com]

Have you asked Lis what her perspective is? Not that that should be who you aim to please, please yourself of course. I always told myself when I was down that if I could just lose a few pounds I would be happier, if I could just do this or that but I lost those few pounds and the next time I got depressed it didn't work. I realized that when I was already happy being thin made me a little happier yes, but when I got depressed, my weight didn't matter at all, I was just as depressed as I was at a heavier weight. Now I need to think of another lie to tell myself when I get depressed.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

She's doing the Weight Watchers thing with me, and is down 25, 30 pounds, which puts her also five pounds to her goal, and fitting into clothes she wore just after college. Indeed, that's annoying her, because a year ago, we decided that it was stupid to keep those clothes around, since we were never going to wear them again, and we sold or donated almost all of them. We had enough left over that she could confirm that she can now wear them all, but she no longer has many of her favorite clothes that she COULD have been wearing again.

People who are less geeky than we are have suggested that this is an opportunity for her, because it gives her an excuse to go shopping for a new wardrobe again; her perspective is that she already WENT shopping, 25 years ago, and she is annoyed that she has to do it AGAIN. Shopping every quarter century is just an annoying chore that she could have put off if she wanted to.

And, even MORE frustratingly, she went shopping LAST YEAR, and now can't wear THOSE clothes, because they're too BIG now.

She doesn't much mind her body size, because, as far as she's concerned, her body is a sack of carbon and water that carries her brain around. I do all the cooking, so she doesn't have to do any extra work, and I cook well enough that, 90% of the time, she's getting food that she enjoys just as much as the stuff she was having before. She isn't around cake or donuts all THAT often, and, while she eats smaller portions of them than she used to, she encounters it infrequently enough that she has no reason not to partake most of the time she has opportunity to. And she also doesn't feel hungry most of the time.

So for her, the mistake we made in getting rid of clothes she loved (and so did I, because she looked HAWT in them) annoys her, but otherwise, the weight loss thing is irrelevant-to-somewhat-positive.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I think the question they were asking (and if they weren't, I am :-) was not "What does Lis think about her own experiences with Weight Watchers?", but instead "What does Lis think about *your* body changes?"

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

She says she likes it fine.

But, if the question is whether she's attracted to me more or less -- remember, she's asexual. That's not actually THAT relevant a question in our lives. She's not sexually attracted to me, or anybody, anyway.

She can appreciate what I look like aesthetically, and I think she can feel some sort of pride in having a husband who is conventionally attractive. And she says my butt looks better, and I'm kvetching less.

[gingicat]

Perhaps now that you're on a maintenance diet, you could change what you measure? I'll give you my personal experience as an example; I hope that's okay.

I remember you encouraging me 12-ish years ago when I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, wanted to have a kid, and had to behave as though I were a type 2 diabetic in order to do so, including taking metformin. I allowed myself daily small amounts of sugar-free sweets. This had the side effect of going from 200lbs to 163lbs. I gained 30lbs while pregnant (going off metformin and allowing myself a lot of sugar) with the child who is now ten and a half (good grief!). I went back to about 170, still taking metformin, allowing myself a little sugar, and stayed at around 170 till second child, and conception there worked first try.

But after second child was born, I had two body image problems: I had an umbilical hernia distending and weakening my abdomen and I had rolls of skin. Well. Slowly over the next 3 or years, my body crept back up to a level weight of 191, which I checked on my in-laws' scale every few weeks to keep from being obsessive. When it was over 191, I cut back my sugar habit. When my pants started falling down, I went back to eating whatever I wanted. My exercise levels dropped because I had a driving commute. But every year the endocrinologist checked my weight and my overall sugar levels (there's a protein that acts as an indicator) and my weight was the same and my sugars were normal. And my pants fit and the extra fat concealed the umbilical hernia and skin rolls. I stopped taking metformin.

Last December, that protein came back above normal. No more juice nor processed sugar for me. Time to go back to maltitol and Splenda.

So I live with a Ny, and my Ny loves to feed people sweets. And I've certainly partaken. Lately, she makes chocolate bark.

She got a good brand of sugar-free chocolate and made me raisin-peanut bark (Cadbury bar) for me. The next batch had crispy-crunchy puffed grains in it.

I shared it with a coworker who's been living without processed sugar for years. She remarked that it was remarkably mellowing (she hadn't tried sugar-free chocolate) and certainly delicious. Ny made her a batch for her birthday.

I've allowed myself buttermilk pancakes when husband or I have the energy to make them; there is processed sugar, but it's low, and I stopped putting marmalade on.

My weight dropped a bit, and the rolls are back. I need to find some exercise that will help; the umbilical hernia is still there and sit-ups are impossible. My pants are falling down.

But it's worth it to be hopeful that I won't have to go back on metformin again.

And I will happily share my sugar-free Ny sweets with you.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not on maintenance, and won't be for at least half a year, probably more. And my issues aren't simply sugar; they include fats as well, so sugar-free candy is only a partial solution.

[gingicat]

Yeah, I'm working down the list slowly. Processed sugar first, then proceeding through the glycemic index till my brain goes "stop now or you will kick over the bipolar engine."

[grum]

The rabbit hole that is MuTu or the TummyTeam programs might help with some of the abdominal support/strenth issues. I personally find MuTu much less annoying than Tuppler technique was. There are other online "not just kegels" for women's issues after childbirth that are less focused on all diastasis all the time like Fit2Be's programs.

I get it.

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

I absolutely understand this. Completely! I have had the same thoughts! And despite what my husband says, I know from his eyes when he thinks of what he'll have for dessert that he feels exactly the same way too.