Food for thought

Well my deadline is met, and I should be able to ease off at work now and get back into a regular posting routine.

Today was the first opportunity I’ve had in ages to rummage and potter around aimlessly on the ‘net, and in my meanderings I came across this, which has haunted me all day.

The average weekly amount of food eaten by the family from Chad (photo #3) made me feel so humbled and sad, especially when compared against the rich abundance of some of the western diets. It was a striking visual illustration of the shocking divide between the haves and the have-nots – photos that speak a thousand words.

Interestingly, my own weekly grocery list is completely different from that of the UK family, who seem to have an appalling diet morphed from some sort of freaky timewarp. Who are these people, and haven’t they noticed that it’s no longer the 1970s? Who the hell eats mayonnaise sandwiches? And where is their ‘real’ food? Where are their fruits and veggies? Where are their dry goods (pasta, rice, pulses)? Where are their sources of proteins and vitamins? And what’s with all that chocolate? There’s probably more nutrition in the GoCat and Bakers Complete dog chow than in the rest of their food put together.

My own diet most closely resembles that of the families from Egypt (photo #9), Bhutan (photo #14), Italy (photo #2) and Poland (photo #8). Our food bill each week (for two adults) is around £35 – roughly $70 – which is considerably higher than that of the folks from Chad, Egypt, Ecuador, Mongolia and Bhutan (but on the other hand it’s also considerably less than they seem to spend in the US, Japan and Germany, if these families are representative).

Are Kim and I ‘representative’? Probably not. We rarely buy meat or fish, avoid most forms of processed food, and eat tons of fruits and veggies – they’re probably the main component of our diet, along with whole grains and pulses. And we’re probably one of the few households in England that never buys things like Coke, beer or wine, or stuff like pizza or icecream.

Some of this is because we became accustomed to following a healthy diet when Kim was dialysing, and of course it’s also due to the fact that we’re ACTIVELY trying to eat healthily. We make conscious choices of what we eat every day and at every meal – and that conscious deliberation is probably what sets us apart from most ordinary people, who probably just eat on autopilot.

On the other hand, I was bought up in a household where our Saturday tea was peanut butter, jam and pork-pie-pastry sandwiches on crusty white bread, so it’s not as if I don’t understand the lure of the highly processed. White bread still makes my mouth water, and if someone wanted to tempt me big time they wouldn’t have to try very hard – a fresh baked loaf of crusty white bread and a jar of Nutella would do the trick every time.

But most of the time, I stick to the natural stuff, and that’s fine with me because the truth is that I feel good on it. Natural really is best, at least for me. Maybe my grandma wasn’t such a batty old lady after all – maybe in forcing me to eat my greens she really did know what she was talking about! Thanks, gran! I really don’t think I’d have been able to cope with my crazy workload of the past 30 days if I’d been fuelling my body on pizza and pop-tarts.

Veggies and whole grains rock!

But choice is nice, right? And it’s the lack of choice that’s so sad about that Chad photo. When those people are having a shitty day, they simply don’t have the wherewithal to pop to the grocery store for a fix of comfort food – a bottle of wine or a bar of Green and Blacks chocolate, or a pint of Ben and Jerrys. They can’t just think “Oh, sod it! I’ll have a piece of cake and make up for it with tomorrow’s workout.” For them it’s a case of rice or nothing – and not exactly an abundance of rice either.

Sometimes I forget just how lucky I am…

I'm Still Here....

Sorry for the long silence, folks, but because of a horrendous deadline at work I've worked 410 hours in the past 30 days (without a single day off), and I simply haven't had a chance to post.

Thankfully the project deadline is on Tuesday next week so after that I should be able to sleep for more than 4 hours a night, and the good news is that though I haven't found the time to post, I HAVE been finding time to eat properly and to exercise for an hour a day. Which I feel pretty damn proud of, to tell the truth. I think it's indicative of how far I've progressed over the past two years. Work pressure like this in times past would have sent me straight off the wagon...

Thanks for those of you who posted comments wondering where I was - I really appreciate your concern. I promise I'll be back to regular posting from next week!

Ciao!

Baby Steps to Victory!

My Rome break is now a distant memory, and thankfully I’m back in the saddle with both my eating and exercise (despite a soft tissue injury to my left foot). Whenever there’s any sort of break in my routine it’s always a fraught time for me, because I’m always worried that without the comfort of my familiar regimes and disciplines I’ll start slipping out of control, and won’t stop backsliding until I’m all the way back to the starting point. It’s happened to me so often in the past that I don’t have any complacency around this issue at all.

Reassuringly, though, I seem to have weathered the storm with flying colours, and I must admit to feeling pretty damn pleased with myself. I enjoyed my vacation, but now its time to knuckle back down to work. Go, Fatslayer! For me, that willingness to get straight back into the groove is pretty much unprecedented. In the past I’ve had 5-day vacations and Christmas breaks that have lasted in dieting terms for over two years!

Something’s different this time, and I’ve been broadly on track for 18 months now, and swatted away pesky little holidays like flies. I’ve had ups and downs and gains and losses over that period, but on the whole I’ve been able to stop any vacation rot before its really taken hold, and managed to keep things on a reasonably even keel.

Change is nice, don’t you think? Especially when it’s in a positive direction, and one seems to actually be improving. I like the new dieting me much better than the old dieting me. Old dieting me was an all-or-nothing dieter, either uber-disciplined and focussed on goals to the exclusion of everything else, or else careening badly out of control and eating everything that wasn’t nailed to the table. New dieting me steers a middle course, just meandering along broadly in control but without obsessively counting every calorie.

I’ve finally realised that my past dieting fiascos weren’t a total waste of time, because they taught me valuable lessons about myself. Maybe I’m just a slow learner, and needed all the false starts and blunders to really help me to grasp the underlying principles (which are really quite simple, when you finally boil everything down to the bare bones.) Perhaps it’s time to stop beating myself up for past failures, and to see them as just part of a 42-year learning curve.

Because, let's be honest, it hasn’t been a smooth journey for me. If you killed me and sliced me in half, you could practically see my dieting history in the rings of feast and famine etched around my midriff. I should donate my body to medical science, so that when I'm dead scientists can peer into my innards and think “Oh yes, this was the great 16 month famine of 1982-83 (70lbs lost) followed by the nine month bumper harvest of 1984 (weight gain of 80lbs), followed by another mini-famine in 1995 (11 weeks, 21lbs lost) followed by years of plenty from 1996-1998 (101lbs gained)." And so on and so on, ad bloody nauseam.

But all that dieting - all those successes and failures – MUST have taught me something. In all difficult endeavours, people have tried and failed and tried again until they finally got it right. Why should dieting be any different?

And if that’s the case, a record of unmitigated failure in the past doesn’t mean I can’t succeed eventually, right?

Right.

I’ve been thinking about the things that have derailed my efforts in the past, and I’ve realised that there are two main reasons why I usually quit, and both of them are psychological.

One is guilt-induced and one is envy-induced.

The guilt one is a nasty one, that’s taken some beating. It involves me suddenly feeling guilty for taking care of my health, and concluding that it’s selfish, self-indulgent and frivolous for me to be so concerned about my personal welfare, and to be devoting precious time to my own self-improvement. Given that Kim has major health problems that have almost certainly had a negative impact on his life expectancy, this can really be an insidious form of self-sabotage, and it’s thrown me off course more times than I care to mention.

The envy one is also pretty crafty, and it involves me suddenly feeling that it’s unfair that I should have to make so many foodie sacrifices and to exercise so bloody hard when there are other people with Kate Moss physiques who live on vast quantities of cheese burgers and chocolate. I start throwing caution to the wind, and thinking ‘Why should I deny myself? I deserve a treat, and if they can have a doughnut, so the hell can I…’ And before you know it, I’m back to wearing granny pants and struggling to run for a bus without needing to call out the paramedics.

Understanding why I’ve crashed and burned in the past is key to finally stopping the endless cycle. What’s making the whole thing so much easier this time around is that I’m trying to be a bit kinder to myself and to cut myself some slack so that the whole journey feels less intense and life-or-deathish.

I give myself encouraging pep talks, in which I manage to convince myself (most of the time) that my body deserves to be well cared for, and that neglecting my own health isn’t going to restore his to Kim. In fact, it’s more important than ever that I keep strong and fit so that he can depend on me.

I tell myself it’s not the end of the world if the scales don’t budge or if I miss an exercise session – that life goes on and that tomorrow is another day.

And finally – you may not believe this about me, but it’s true! - I’ve realised that cheeseburgers and chocolate aren’t the epitome of desirability, even if everyone else around me seems to think so.

I think that’s progress, don’t you?

Ahhh, la dolce vita!

So I’ve been in Rome for the past week, and had a wonderful time, and gained 2 lbs – not bad for eating whatever the hell I felt like, and drinking enough Italian beer and wine to refloat the Titanic.

The Mediterranean diet is so delicious! We stayed with Italian friends and every day we ate homemade pasta with piquant fresh sauces, fresh crusty bread with lots of salt and lashings of extra virgin olive oil, rocket and shaved parmeggiano salads (with more salt and olive oil!), grilled lamb, chicken and fish (more olive oil and salt!), grilled or marinated vegetables (guess what, more olive oil and salt!) and all washed down with lots of fresh water, wine and beer….ah, la dolce vita!

So today we’re home and we’ve been grocery shopping, and filled our trolley with all the good things that we’ve been eating all week in Italy. We bought fresh pasta and fresh braesola and Italian red wine and a huge chunk of parmeggiano reggiano, and fresh organic rocket, and zucchini, and ciabatta bread, and vine ripened tomatoes, and olives, and lemons, and yoghurt, and organic garlic, and salad potatoes, and red and yellow peppers, and basil, and the best quality organic extra virgin cold pressed olive oil that we could find.

The Mediterranean diet is supposed to be one of the world’s healthiest, so why do I feel so guilty and self indulgent? I expect to gain weight at the rate of a pound a week eating this kind of food every day – it’s too delicious to be healthy! It feels hedonistic and bacchanalian to devour things like olive oil and red wine – it can’t possibly be good for us, can it?

Life will certainly be tastier and more enjoyable if we carry on eating the way we did in Italy. Unlike previous trips to Rome, on this occasion we skipped the twice daily gelato and pastry stops, and this time we only had one gelato the entire trip (and one pastry) so it’s not as if we ate crap all the time – and this morning we didn’t buy fresh cream or gelato or cake or pastries or biscotti or anything ‘fattening’ at the grocery store - but I still feel as if the food police are going to swoop down and arrest me for criminal self-indulgence.

If I want to eat this way, I’ll need to do about 5 hours exercise every day!

Is it worth it?

Mmmmmmm - maybe!

I want the real thing!

PastaQueen raised a really interesting issue in this post, which has given me much food for thought. Would I give up working hard to lose my surplus weight if I could magically appear thin to everyone else, whilst still being fat in real life? Would the illusion of thinness be enough to satisfy me (especially if it meant I could relax my dietary restrictions and exercise regime etc)?

For me, the answer is an unequivocal and resounding NO.

This lifestyle that I’m plugging away at isn’t just a question of aesthetics, or of satisfying a perceived ideal of what I should look like or what I should weigh. If suddenly fat became the new thin, and the fashionistas suddenly wanted us all to look like the Venus of Willendorf, I’d still carrying on trying to get lean and fit.

Not because I hate obesity, or because I think that fat people are ugly or unattractive. Beauty is a cultural construct, changing across societies and through the passage of time. At the moment the western world is going through a “thin is best” phase, but this doesn’t mean that values and mores won’t change, and that voluptuous women won’t have their turn sometime in the future.

Before I go any further, I’ll just say that this really isn’t meant to be a fat-bashing post, though it may seem that way in parts. I support and admire the fat acceptance movement, and envy those women who are truly happy with being fat and who don’t wish to change. Sometimes I really wish I could be truly happy with being fat because - as a life-long fat person - life would be so much easier if I could just accept myself that way and be content. The truth, though, is that I can’t. Whilst I’ve never experienced the intense self-loathing of many fat women, my bottom line perception is that when I’m fatter the whole quality of my life deteriorates.

It’s not just the little things that impact negatively, like not having access to a wide range of clothing styles or not being able to fit through turnstiles or into airline seats etc. Those things can be easily remedied by a small shift in cultural acceptance – just make the damn things bigger, for crying out loud, and life as a heftier person would be immediately improved.

What can’t be so easily remedied, though, are the physical side effects of being fat – and it’s those side effects that I dislike and want to avoid in future.

I accept that obesity doesn’t necessarily equal being unhealthy or unfit. There are plenty of healthy fat people around, and plenty of sickly unfit skinny people too, so it’s not a question of one being necessarily better or worse than the other.

The crux of the matter, though, is that sometimes it’s just plain uncomfortable to be fat.

When you’re fat, visiting hot countries (or even worse LIVING in a hot country) can cause all sorts of irritating little niggles. For instance, it’s difficult to stay cool when you can’t go barelegged because of the dreaded thigh-chafe, and then there are the nasty sore spots that develop in the nooks and crannies where sweat collects – underneath pendulous boobs or in the crease of an overhanging tummy are the areas that spring immediately to mind.

Then there’s the lack of suppleness and mobility, the shortness of breath, the aching back if you have to do much standing around or walking, and the sheer hard work of having to support those surplus pounds that literally weigh you down and sap your energy.

Whilst mulling over these issues yesterday, I caught sight of two cats in my neighbour’s garden, one of normal slender cat dimensions, and the other hugely overweight. They’re the same age – in fact they’re from the same litter - but one (the thin one) belongs to my neighbour whilst the other one belongs to his mom, and he’s looking after it whilst she’s in Florida.

Both are beautiful cats, both are graceful, both are lovable and a pleasure to behold. But only the lean cat was lithe and light on its feet and able to leap easily onto the top of a six feet wall. The lean cat was energetic and playful, whilst the fat cat was snoozy and indolent.

The increase in physical energy released by being slimmer is the thing that makes it so desirable for me.

You only have to look at people throughout history to see that being fat is not the optimal condition. Could fat hunters have managed to catch enough wild game to bring us out of the prehistoric period? Could the pyramids have been built by a fat workforce? Could Roman armies have conquered the world if all of the soldiers had been obese? Could fat farmers have tilled the land, tamed the forests, and brought about the agrarian revolution? Could fat miners have dug out the ores and coal that propelled us into the industrial age?

Maybe…but probably not.

Since the dawn of time, obesity has been a luxury. Only the very rich – waited on hand and foot – have had the freedom to be fat. If you’re sitting on a comfortable shaded litter overseeing the sweaty toiling hordes, maybe being fat isn’t an inconvenience or an inhibitor – but if you’re one of those toiling workers labouring for endless hours under a burning sun, I bet being fat would be a serious disadvantage.

And whilst nowadays life is much less arduous, and being fat is no longer such a physical drawback, it’s still a physical inhibitor when it comes to certain climates or certain activities. Forget about hauling blocks of stone through the desert to build a pyramid – I’m not talking about heavy league stuff like that. What I’m talking about is performing some of the simplest most basic activities, like bending down to retrieve a dropped pencil in a crowded corridor, cutting one’s toenails, scratching an annoying itch between the shoulder blades, running for a bus, tying one’s shoelaces. They’re not exactly demanding tasks, are they? Nope, they’re just the simple things that slim people do on autopilot, without even thinking about them. And I want to be able to do them on auto-pilot too!

Simple things can all become a bit of a challenge if you’re carrying 100+ extra pounds, and sadly most of us don’t have an army of attendants to slavishly do those things for us. We just have to manage as best we can.

But ‘managing as best you can’ isn’t enough, is it? Or at least it isn’t enough for me. I want to be making the most of this incredible gift I’ve been given – using my body to its full capacity, not suffocating it in a cocoon of blubber.

And if I have to work hard to make that transformation happen, then I think it’s worth every ounce of effort because the rewards are endless and amazing.

When push comes to shove, illusion is better than nothing, but it'll only get you so far. Having the real thing is infinitely better!

Never too old....

Women in my family never exercise. My mom and sisters would no more think of putting on sweats and trainers to go for a jog than they would of putting on thigh high fuck-me boots and a mini skirt for doing a spot of streetwalking. Both activities are outside their experience and their imagination. They are things that abnormal other women do.

Though she thinks it’s weird that I exercise, mom is definitely intrigued by my commitment. She questions me about it in our weekly phone calls, and whenever I visit she bombards me with questions about the frequency and duration of my exercising, and my motivation for willingly getting so hot and sweaty.

I try to keep up my daily workout routine when I visit, and this affords her the opportunity to observe my strange behaviour at close quarters. My parents don’t have a spare bedroom, so I’m forced into exercising in the public arena of the living room, and she sits in her recliner and watches me avidly whilst I’m doing my improvised steps, press-ups, crunches and planks etc in the middle of the living room as if I’m a particularly fascinating lab rat running on a wheel. It seems that I’m more diverting than TV because she only half-watches that, but she gives me her full attention, watching me with the same rapt attention as a Labrador waiting for tantalising morsels to drop from its owner’s dinner plate.

In last night’s phone call she announced that she bought a mini-trampoline a month ago, ostensibly so that I have an alternative to steps for my cardio workouts whenever I visit. Apparently it was meant to be a secret, lined up for my next visit, but she confessed that she’s been using it herself (“on the sly when your dad’s out”). This confession was offered up with as much chagrin and self-puzzlement as if she’d had to admit to smoking crack or cruising for toy boys. Father forgive me for I have sinned, I’ve turned into an exercise junkie!

She admitted that - inspired by me! - she’s been “enjoying a bouncing session” every other day for the past four weeks. What's more, she feels so much better for it, as it helps her digestion and her bad back. And yesterday she had a physical check-up and her doctor was thrilled with the improvement in her fitness and posture.

Not bad for an eighty year old, huh?

It just goes to show that you're never too old to start!

Now all she has to do is inspire my sisters...

Good guys vs bad guys

By complaining about my friend, I’ve caused her some bad karma. The wedding is off, the relationship is over, and she’ll be permanently returning to England on June 21st.

Whilst I can’t say I’m sorry she’s split up with the louse and I’m sure eventually she’ll see that he was a toxic presence in her life, I do feel bad for how heartbroken she is at present. She’s devastated because he did the dumping, and she was the dumpee, not the other way around.

Though he’s not exactly built like Mr Universe himself, he said he found her flabby and unattractive, and said he wasn’t prepared to settle for second best. In the beginning he treated her like porcelain and deluged her with flowery compliments every minute of the day, but by the end (after only 3 months!) he was rude, abusive and derogatory. Which - as you might imagine – has wreaked havoc on her already rocky self-esteem.

At times like these, I appreciate my own partner immensely. He’s not a slushy kind of man, and not particularly articulate or effusive when it comes to paying compliments. But, on the other hand, he’s never, ever in the entire 18 years we’ve been together ever made a hurtful comment about my weight, or made me feel bad about the way I look. I can totally and absolutely be myself around him, and he never makes me feel like he’s biting back insults or swallowing feelings of disgust or disapproval.

And that’s the way it should be, right? That attitude shouldn’t be exceptional – it should be the default one in every relationship, in my opinion. A partner should support and applaud the other one’s attempts to improve, without making them feel that failure is not an option.

Last night I finished a hard HIIT session, and since my T-shirt was uncomfortably sweaty I took it off and sat cross-legged on the floor in just my sport bra and jogging pants whilst I drank my water. I was red-faced and bedraggled, and showing off my squidgy midriff in all its glory, looking like I’d got a flesh-toned anaconda wrapped several times around my waist.

“Ignore my fat rolls and pretend I’m gorgeous”, I said to Kim.
“I don’t need to pretend – you ARE gorgeous”, he said.
And then he smiled at me, as if he meant it.

And that, my friends, is why I know I’m a lucky woman!

Now I just have to keep my friend away from abusive losers until she finds someone who will love her in the same unconditional manner...