Diet Diary

I have nothing to do except stress out about my weight. I am on academic probation for my Master's program and that makes my weight seem like the one part of my life that I can control---that is, IF I could control it.

After I work out for more than 40 minutes with my punching bag, I don't feel hungry. I feel weak and sleepy. The day after I work out, I tend to binge eat like I am having my last meal. It becomes a crushing hunger pang that won't leave me alone until I eat. What is worse, since I exercised to the point of exhaustion, I am sore and too weak to burn off the excess calories I inevitably binge eat the day afterwards.

Yesterday, I ate 600 calories until 4 pm, which is fine. However, around 5 pm, I became famished and panicked. I drove to a fast food joint and binge ate a medium sized combo meal for a whopping total of 1000 calories. Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up hungry and ate 5 small raw apricots. So much sugar and sodium! I really hate that the thought of grease and butter sends me into pleasurable conniptions.

Today, I have had 400 calories and it's nearly 2 pm. The thing is, 80 calories is in pure half and half creamer. Another 110 calories comes from the Red Bull Red Edition drink I had. I feel bloated and I am burping, despite eating 210 calories in actual food (80 calorie serving of Fiber One with small amount of 30 calorie Almond milk in the morning, a small serving of home-made lentil soup for lunch). I drink so much liquid that I get bloated and when I weight myself I weigh even more than I would expect based on my solid food intake. That makes me depressed....that makes me start thinking about french fries.

I am writing so that I can distract myself from the thought of cheap dollar nuggets at Wendys. I feel full, but I keep thinking about food. Grrr..Hopefully, I won't be so sore tonight and then I can exercise for 40 minutes and burn off some calories from the past two days...but then tomorrow how I will crave sugar and carbs!!

Sleep Eating as Binge Eating

I alternate between losing 3 pounds and gaining 3 pounds. I went to see my psychiatrist and the intake nurse weighed me (with shoes on--important point there). I was one pound heavier, despite my diet. I blame it on not doing my boxing routine for several hours that week. 168 pounds on a tiny 5 foot, 2 inch tall woman. I believe that puts me in the obese category.

I am on summer break so I currently I am not in martial arts classes. I want to take either kickboxing or judo over the summer except I need to raise about 200 dollars to cover the expenses through August. Martial arts are excellent for keeping the heart active. It also makes me more flexible and agile. Even though I sometimes barely lose any weight, I feel the martial arts are more than just an exercise--it's like a life path of self-discipline and self-awareness. To accept physical pain as a daily routine can have emotional benefits as well. I learned to cope with stress by working out and focusing on my partner. But I digress...

So anyways, I am still fat. It has been 2 and a half weeks of summer break and I still have not made the scale budge at all. Usually, it takes only a week to see a pound come off. For me, three pounds disappear over night and then promptly return 3 days later. It is a vicious cycle.

I monitor my eating. Sometimes my mother brings home hamburgers and yes, I eat that. I then punish myself by eating even less the next day, but then she brings home pasta for dinner and yes, I eat some. She then gets very mad when I sleep eat during the middle of the night. I have this odd habit of half waking up in the middle of the night, feeling insatiably restless, getting out of bed, and going into the kitchen where I rummage in the dark and feast on whatever I can find. The past few weeks I have eaten this stuff:

2  pears one night
3 packets of graham crackers another night
1/2-1 cup of cold rice out of the fridge another night
1 bag of pre-popped popcorn that I didn't eat while awake but stuffed into my mouth at 3 a.m.
1 bottle of Ensure which comes with a whopping 300++ calories per bottle

On average, I eat 200 calories for breakfast, 300-500 calories for lunch, 400-600 calories for dinner, and an extra 300-500 calories in a sleep eating binge. No, this is not the ghastly 3000 calorie diet of other obese people. You have to understand that once you lose more than 20 pounds your body resists losing anymore weight. Once you eat less and successfully lose weight, you are doomed to restricted calories for the rest of your life! I can never go back to eating 2000 calories per day, which is the healthy requirement for other women. Having dropped from 194 pounds to 150 pounds in a span of a little more than a year, my body will gain weight if I eat more than 1500 calories or more than 1700 calories on a day of extensive exercise. If I eat more than 1400 calories I do not lose weight, I just don't gain any weight. I am trying 1200 calories per day with exercise but these nightly binges wreck my daily discipline. Currently, on a bad day, I eat 1800 calories a day, which is like 2500 calories for a normal woman who has not lost more than 20 pounds in the past 2 years. I still have not adjusted to the fact that I am not a normal woman's weight and that I can not ever eat like a normal woman. I have to work hard just to maintain this level of fatness. To be thin, it will take even harder work, obsessive diet control, and excruciating amounts of butt-busting exercise. Even with that control over my life, I still won't see results for a while.

I am drinking a Starbucks coffee with splenda and creamer. I already know that the creamer has about 50-70 calories in half and half. That is why I can only have a packet of instant oatmeal for breakfast, so that I have about 230-250 calories for breakfast. My snacks will include non fat half and half stirred into coffee and tea. I get quite a bit of calories from half and half stirred into caffeinated drinks. I don't know if that is a better option than eating a pear. Not that it matters, I don't have any pears lying around. Lunch...hmmmm...lunch will most definitely not be the left-over pasta from last night. Maybe I will have some boiled cauliflower, sauteed in olive oil and Indian spices. Plus, a raw tomato with olive oil and black pepper splashed on top. Or maybe I will just have some turkey with mustard on flat bread. For dinner? That's hard. A bag of popcorn as an appetizer, maybe 3 corn tortillas with melted slices of pepperjack cheese, and endless cups of tea with non fat half and half. For middle of the night--nothing. HA! Like that will happen. I have realized if I don't decide what to eat ahead of time I tend to eat things like the cold rice out of the fridge. I guess I should wean myself off nightly food by eating smaller and smaller amounts. So, for tonight, maybe I'll take a measured portion of popcorn to my room. Not the whole bag, just a little cup of popcorn.

Spring Break, Mental Health, & how I gained Weight

I am being transferred from an intensive out-care program to the county's relaxed mental health care system. I am not sure how I feel about this, as memories of this county facility still haunts me --- being sent away repeatedly and then finally getting to see one befuddled doctor who wrote the incorrect prescription and left me without medicine for a good 2 months (while I was floridly psychotic).

Hopefully, I can make all my doctor's appointments without fail, otherwise there might be a three month wait period.

Wish me luck, I'll need it if this new care program is like the last time I remember.

******************************************
Good news = I am president of a club and I actually did get our event approved.
Bad news = I had no spring break because I have been working on arrangements for the event.
More bad news=I did like 2 pages of a 15 page paper only. I still need to do my programming homework.
Good news = I had a cup of chai and I'm feeling good,
**********************************************

Lately, I've been reading a lot of race relations articles and I am feeling a little queasy from thinking about how many anti-immigrant/anti-minority people are running around out there. I'll keep it to myself for now, since I don't feel like going off on some political rant.

Ah heck, I'll do it anyways. marriage =. Immigration reform. Break the glass ceiling. Down with neo-nazis. Up with Bill Maher. Okay, I'm done.

******************
On my weight
OMG. I gained weight while taking two hours of martial arts twice a week! Four hours per week for nothing! Nothing! I now am at the heaviest I have been since I first modified my diet intake 2 years ago; 171 pounds. Yes, it's technically in the obese range. Yes, I hate my body (except for my boobs which have returned to a plump, seductive G cup). Yes, I gained a whopping 20 pounds in under 5 months. I don't know what to do. The more I think about my weight the more despondent I get and the more I want to comfort eat. I ate a doughnut today. I hate myself for eating that doughnut. The long walk to the doughnut store and back home only burned off a quarter of the calories I consumed in doughnut. I ate half my dinner today, but I didn't use my stationary bike or my punching bag as exercise, so I feel bloated and disgusting. My dinner was a couple of tablespoons of white rice and some nopales my mom made. My lunch was that doughnut. For breakfast I had a bowl of oatmeal with a bunch of fresh blueberries. Then, right after breakfast, my mom came home from taking the elderly neighbor lady to the grocery store. The elderly lady, in her naive kindness, bought my mom a tray of mini cupcakes. I literally doubled over when I saw them. My kryptonite. This is the reason why I don't buy any chips, baked goods, ice cream, or frozen pizzas. I have issues with moderation. I cannot eat a little handful of chips, or just 1 mini cupcake. I will literally flee the kitchen and hide in my room, without the treat. Then, for hours, I will think about the treat. Eventually, I break down, sneak into the kitchen, grab the entire bag/carton/tray of treats and secretly eat in my bedroom. This is the reason why I always buy roma tomatoes, cheese, and tea instead. When there are no sugary, sodium-laced, greasy alternatives, I eat quite healthy. But when a naively kind neighbor lady buys us mini cupcakes, I crumble after an hour of pouting on my bed and trying to distract myself by watching BBC documentaries on the internet. Yes, I ate 3 mini-cupcakes, and then I couldn't stop myself. I walked to the doughnut store and bought a coffee and a doughnut. I came home. 2 more mini-cupcakes. I despise mini-cupcakes. They must be walked into the jungle and left for the pumas. Down with mini-sprinkle cupcakes!!

I like my boobs. They are plump. They are the only part of my body I am fond of. I will now end this little blog entry by writing a positive, self-affirming statement about my fattened up body. My boobs are awesome. Guys always stare at my boobs. Sometimes, women stare at my boobs, too. Sometimes I think I must have spilled something on my blouse and people are just wondering what the stain is, which is why they are staring so intensely for so long, but then I look down and nope, just my boobs. Then, there is this awkward moment when both of us are standing there staring down at my boobs. I think I am kind of flattered. Still, it's like, what, am I wearing a dirty shirt? Are my nipples popping out? Is there like a stain that looks like a milk leak or something??

Joining the Cult of Thinness

The Cult of Thinness is a book by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Her credentials are top notch; she is both a professor of sociology at Boston College and a woman who was asked to investigate why so many college-aged females were brought in to the college health center for eating disorders. Through intense research, personal interviews, and her own brilliant insights, Professor Hesse-Biber wound up writing a series of books on women's weight issues, books which delve into deeper topics such as women's rights and roles in American society.

As a Chicana (Chicana=Mexican female born in the US), one might think I would have some insulation to the peer pressures to be thin that plagues so many Caucasian females. However, I was raised in California with copies of Cosmo, Vogue, and 17 magazine just like everyone else and the effects were on par as my Caucasian counter-parts. No, I couldn't ever be pale-skinned and blonde, but being thin was the one thing I could be. Wanting to fit in with my classmates, who were predominately Caucasian, I picked at my food, dieted whenever I didn't fit into size 5 anymore in order to get back to size 5, and I never went over 115 until my mid-20's

 I was thoughtlessly thin until around age 23 or 24 when Zyprexa, the anti-psychotic drug (I became schizo-affective in my 20's), cause me to gain upwards of 60-70 pounds. This isn't unheard of as one of my psychiatrists commented that he'd had a patient who'd rapidly gained 100 pounds as soon as he was put on Zyprexa. As soon as I was 25, when most people are graduating from college, getting real jobs, and maybe even getting married,  my life dissolved into one of regimented pill-taking, intense psychological scrutiny, the inability to complete college due to psychiatric disability, and the part I dreaded most: living as a fat person. If society had treated me differently I wouldn't have minded the fat as much as I did, but I was publicly ridiculed for being 180 pounds on a 5' 1" -5'2" build.

At age 26 (or 25, I forget) I fasted myself back to 135 pounds. Nowhere near my skinniest weight, I was miserably. Shortly thereafter, the effects of an untreated metal illness kicked in and I was soon being poked, prodded, and scrutinized inside a psychiatric hospital where the familiar faces of the mental health staff were shocked to see how much weight I'd lost. I couldn't understand why they were so adamant that I eat 3 meals a day: couldn't they see that the weight gain was worse than the mental illness? No, they did not see that the weight gain was worse and instead they dutifully forced me to drink milk and eat at least half of all my meals. Combined with my new medications and the accompanying side effects, I gained all the weight back, plus about 10 pounds.

Then, I yo-yo'd from a size 14 to a size 16, back to a size 14, and back to a size 16 before I got my life together and was admitted to the University.

Happy ending, right? Ex-EDNOS female now a size 14 (162-164 pounds), getting exercise, going to University, taking proper medication for mental illness, all goes well, right?

If that were true I probably wouldn't gravitate towards books on self-image. For that matter, I wouldn't be writing graphic tales of my mental illness and personal life experiences on the internet for anybody to read!

Reading The Cult of Thinness made me realize how zany it was to believe that being fat was worse than being insane. The sad thing is, according to the book, this belief is perfectly normal in our society. Dieting is like a rite of passage. Mexicans have quinceneras, where 15 year olds dress up like brides and take Catholic vows, Americans have weigh-ins, not to see if you're healthy or not, but to determine just how much weight you must lose to be acceptable to society.

I say all this like I'm going to jump off the band-wagon, but shirking this sort of social media brainwashing isn't that easy. If anything, I have to re-take my vow of dieting. I feel like I got married to this idea of thinness at age 13, cheated on Thin by getting fat in my mid-twenties, and am only now making amends by eating a zucchini for lunch. Just like in the Catholic faith, there is no divorce once you join the Cult of Thinness.

To those of you who are ready to get a divorce, read this book! It has amazing insights into how women focus on their appearance to avoid focusing on glass ceilings, wage discrimination, war, and other horrors of modern life.

The Cult of Thinness Book for sale on amazon dot com

Weight Loss: 25 pounds in 6 months

My martial arts instructor commented last week about how I had lost 5 pounds since the start of the semester back in August. I laughed because he had hit my number right on the mark! What he doesn't know is that I've actually lost a good 25 pounds since the Spring semester. Fad diet? Jenny Craig? Gym membership? None of the above.

I started weighing myself this April. 184 pounds, tipping the scale into the obese range, and lugging around a lot of extra flesh. I decided the weight had to go. As a senior in college, it always bothered me that I was the heavy girl in class. I wanted to be fit, not the svelte, model-thin bodies that stroll around campus with chips on their shoulders, but active and healthy. Despite how I feel about fat prejudice, I understood that I was doing harm to my body and that I should take steps to improve my blood pressure, nutrition, and activity level---not for vanity's sake but for my internal health. So I started a improvised system of weight loss---it's not weight loss, it's weight control.

The key is to see life events as obstacles to control. If you have a bad day you feel like you're not in control. If you buy a fast food meal, then it's really out of control. You haven't just lost temporary control, you've set yourself back a week! I decided that I wanted control over my life. I wanted control over my urges. Maybe I couldn't squeeze back into the size 5 pants from 5 years ago, but I could work hard and lose a dress size, and I did.

I started writing down everything I ate and drank. Yes, drinks too. I realized those super market flavored drinks were around 160-200 calories each! That's not even something that would make me feel full! I saw that my spreadsheet of meals included lots of meat. I read up on meat. It turns out Americans consume way over the recommended allotment for protein by our meat-eating habits. I have always been fond of microwavable chicken patties. It took some time, but I finally acknowledged that the calories, the salt, and the excess protein was bad. So I quit meat cold turkey (pun!). Then, I started to count calories. I read the ingredient list if I was eating a microwavable dinner. I searched for calorie counts of different items like white rice versus brown rice (if you're going to eat rice, get BROWN! White rice is luxurious but man, will it cost you in terms of calories!) I even read the caloric count on the bottle of healthy olive oil I was using to saute my vegetables (count: 120 per tablespoon).

Slowly, things started to get easier. My blood pressure became healthy. I started to lose weight, slowly but surely. I stayed under 2000 calories and above 1300 calories most days. How much I ate depended on how active I'd been that day. If I'd just done homework, cleaned my room, took an hour walk, I'd have less calories. If I exercised for at least 20 minutes, I allowed myself to eat an after-dinner bowl of cereal (I have an odd habit of craving Honey Bunches of Oats at night).

Then, when I had some income, I purchased a moderately inexpensive rowing machine. I found that it worked both the arms and thighs and was easy on the joints. I began to use it, first for only 10 minutes a day, a few days of the week, then 20 minutes most days of the week. I tried to jump into it at first, going an hour, but the next day I was too sore to do any exercises. I learned that with physical activity, it's better to start off in the shallow end of the pool and slowly move to the deep end. I now have the rowing machine, a stationary exercise bicycle, a pilates band, a 10 pound weight, and several belly-dancing exercise DVD's. Yes, I actually use them. When I started the Fall semester at the University I enrolled in a martial arts class. It was very hard at first, especially for somebody who was about 165 pounds (I'd lost 20 pounds by then, eating healthy veggies, counting calories, working out, walking, and reading up on binge eating and other eating disorders).

Now, about 3 months in, I finally broke that weight plateau of 165 pounds and lost another 5 pounds. I feel more energetic, my health is good, and I feel in control of my academic life and my personal life. I've been a vegetarian 90% of the time since this April. My main staple dish is sauteed zucchini with coriander, cumin, and turmeric. Boiled cauliflower comes in a close second. First, I boil the cauliflower, then I put a tablespoon of olive oil and some teaspoons of spices in a pan and saute the softened cauliflower. It tastes good. My craving for high-salt, high-butter, high-oil foods has decreased. Sure, I have my bad days, but I just concentrate on regaining my control the next day.

I intend on staying in control from now on. I intend on managing my mental diagnosis by taking my medicine daily and keeping all my doctor's appointments. I intend on managing my schoolwork by keeping up with my home-work and readings. Lastly, I intend on managing my weight by keeping up with a healthy life-style and another semester of aerobic exercise classes.

I look through the internet trying to find people's success stories but they usually come with a hyped-up product to sell with the promise of extreme weight loss. Even though I'm not at my goal weight of 145 pounds, I'm slowly getting there. I'm 25 pounds closer to this goal. I did it the healthy way, not the pill-popping, starvation diet, lock your self in a gym and don't eat anything that's not raw way. I feel pretty good writing this. Hopefully, in a few months, I can write about how I lost another 5 pounds and describe all the new methods I will have learned!

Thanks for reading!

Comment on the book "Appetite"

The book, "Appetites: Why Women Want," by Carolyn Knapp is an articulate, well-informed, deep analysis of why women starve themselves. Written in lucid prose, Knapp explains her own period of anorexia and expands on her views about why women put themselves through this. Genetics, environment, and personality all play crucial roles in the formation of anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, she writes.

Knapp discusses societal factors that plague women, pushing them from overachieving to under-eating and self-destruction. She discusses the role of feminism within the sphere of eating disorders, saying that women are now allowed in places and jobs they'd never obtained before, but with a catch: don't take up any space and don't complain.

I found this book to be interesting, well-written, deep, and a critical portrait of a society where women are still breaking through gender barriers, the most severe being in the way they present themselves in terms of appearance. It made me understand why anorexics push themselves to such dangerous levels of societal conformity.

One thing that stuck out to me was the author's admiration of a fat woman in her twenties who had stopped abusing herself via dieting and binge/purge cycles. She had decided she'd just be fat and accept that fact. The author relates this woman's plight to a friend of hers, who has a wildly different outlook: 'You admire her, I just see diabetes, heart problems, and hypertension.'

The funny thing is, why do we not look at anorexics and bulimics the same way? If you see diabetes and hypertension whenever you see a fat person, why don't you think, "irregular heartbeat, brittle bone disease, and dangerously low blood pressure" when you see an anorexic? Why the admiration for them?

Just a thought.

Positive Plus Size Role Model: Lane Bryant

It's not quite fury, what I feel, when I read hate-filled comments on the web about overweight and obese people, it's well...frustration. On the one hand, I want to please society. On the other hand, I want to be able to spot these cruel people and avoid them, even if that means being fat and hated.

It's not that I'm not trying to lose weight. I've already lost about approximately 15 pounds since April, sometimes more, depending on whether or not I just ate when I weigh myself. I'm still borderline, in the obese range, being 164, but I've made progress and I work out 2x a day, plus walking, plus dancing. So it's not like I'm lying in bed for the whole day shoving cakes into my mouth.

I do well in college, I work out, I am a nice person, I am a vegetarian who counts calories. But, according to the internet, I am still too fat to be considered "normal" or "likeable" or "acceptable", whatever euphemism there is for "worthless" you can think of, that is what a lot of society sees me as.

Why?

If I had that answer I might not feel such low self-esteem. It's interesting that America is the place where a woman can have sovereign control over her body when it comes to reproductive issues, but fat, no, that is forbidden to women.

People prefer a starving waif who could never naturally bear a child because she lost her ability to menstruate, who is moody and malnourished, whose main achievement in life is self-mutilation, over a plump woman. Society lords this fact over us every second, in every TV commercial, billboard, magazine ad, on the subway, buses, college campus, everywhere. Just everywhere.

I don't hate waifs. What I hate is the attitude that to be worthy I must emulate self-mutilators. I do not want to wreck my metabolism, fail out of college, get hospitalized, get anemia, get mood swings, all that baggage isn't worth it to me. Am I alone in this?

I thought so for a long time, until I stumbled onto the whole fat acceptance movement and their primary fashion spokesperson: Lane Bryant. Watching these women strut up and down the catwalk, toned, fleshy thighs, and overflowing bras, I realized that I don't have to view myself as unattractive just because society says so. I can be loved. I can be worthy of sex. I can wear a skirt should I choose to. Why am I so conditioned to hate my body? How can we let a whole series of generations believe that to be loved you must restrict your dietary intake into the danger zone?

I've decided to keep speaking up, even if nobody is reading this. Even if only one person sees this, maybe it will instill a new mentality or challenge their preconceptions. I can only hope my writing is not in vain.

Abuse of Fat People By Strangers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3o5gdDWZFU&feature=related

This is a link for a youtube video about abuse against fat people by society. I guess it makes sense, as the poet Charles Bukowski put it, people who have no talent become really skilled at hating others, it becomes their only talent, and that's the way it is right now in America. No longer allowed to publicly hate minorities, these haters are focusing their attention on plus size women. They're really good at promoting their hatred.

For example, on a youtube video of an obese woman dancing and enjoying herself 100% of the first page of comments were horrible, cruel, and devastating to read. Some told her she shouldn't post videos that 'promote obesity and disease' that's funny, considering she was dancing, which is an exercise. Others told her they wanted to puke. This is truly the last socially acceptable form of discrimination and hate crimes (verbally harassing somebody on the street is technically illegal).

It's not enough that fat people are forced to put up with discrimination from clothing manufacturers, bra manufacturers, and whoever makes those desks at the University, but now fat people must also tolerate hatred, demeaning comments, stereotypes, and prejudice everywhere they go by total strangers. If you're one of these people, you should know: a fat person can lose weight, but you can't lose that attitude problem you have.

Why do we tolerate assholes, bigots, and slanderers over a person who just wants to shop for clothes or buy groceries without unwanted comments, sneers, or laughs? From now on I vow to say a loud F$$% you asshole to anybody who comments on the size of my thighs, butt, or boobs.

And for the record, reading these ugly, hateful comments all over the internet makes me want to STOP losing weight, and GAIN weight so that at least I know I won't attract any of these callous, superficial brain-dead assholes that like to belittle innocent people. So, if your point is to get fat people to lose weight, you f--- up, I don't want to be like you. I want to know who you are so I can avoid you, not attract people like you. You're really hindering my weight loss by having major attitude problems and there should really be a clinic for assholes. Like asshole rehab or something.

~Thick Bitch

weight loss: 20 pounds in 4 months

Being bombarded with Carl's Jr. commercials and billboards promoting the latest beer brand makes weight loss an exercise in self-discipline. Everywhere I go, drink Coke, eat meat, buy Bud light, and always, always, it's being advertised by a size 0 model with huge breast implants and a winning smile. As if! There is no way that pretty model ate that burger in her hand, or drank that calorie-laden beer she holds. She probably is underweight, according to the BMI chart, and in no position to tell me how to eat healthy, let alone tell me to eat at a fast food joint or to buy beer.

To make things worse, there is no salad bar at my University, meaning that my choices are extremely limited. After shying away from the campus Taco Bell, I went into the snack bar, passing the Panda Express and Subway along the way. Once inside the snack bar, I could choose between a chicken microwavable burrito, a brownie, a sugary muffin, or a bag of chips. I could have one of their many sodas, energy drinks, or a coffee. I settled on a bag of chips and a large coffee, trying to reason with my gurgling stomach that the coffee would sooth the hunger pangs.

Despite eating only an egg at midday and getting lots of exercise through rowing and walking, I felt guilty ripping open the bag of chips. I'm way overweight. I'm 168 right now at 5'1-5'2. Every tiny choice I make inflates my fat cells and increases my risk of diabetes and fat-clogged arteries. No, I don't have any health problems. I just had a blood test and physical last week, and to my surprise, my thyroid hormone levels have raised into the normal range. My blood pressure was fine, my pulse fine. Yet I'm fat, so fat. Only part of it is the psychotropic medications my psychiatrist has me on, and only part of it is the poor decisions I made several years ago, yo-yo dieting, starvation dieting, and eating junk food. I've been a mostly healthy vegetarian for the last 4 months now, and yet I've only lost about 15-20 pounds. That's only five pounds a month. So what gives?

Unfortunately, the decision to lose weight at any cost has left severe consequences now. Starvation diets slows the metabolism, something not easily remedied, even years later. Plus, you either give in to hunger or you die, and I'm not dead. Once you start eating regularly, your body stockpiles every precious calorie on the chance that a Victoria Secret model will send you on another starvation diet sometime in the future. It's not easy to lose weight now. A non-yo-yo dieter would have lost much more than I have in the same time frame and on the same diet. But enough whining, I have lost weight, I will continue to lose weight, and I will do so eating brain and body healthy foods every day.

One trick I've learned the past four months is to use Indian spices on all my vegetables, with double the cayenne pepper. Coriander, cumin, garam masala, turmeric, and cayenne pepper are all ways to make a vegetable delicious and these spices also raise your metabolism and make you feel fuller than you really are. My favorite meal has got to be a zucchini drenched in lemon juice, sauteed in olive oil with the above spices simmering, and with a dash of black pepper ground onto the zucchini in the last stages of cooking. It's so good I have to immediately stick all but a small portion into the fridge lest I return for seconds.

Another trick I've learned is to refrain from snacking after 7:30 pm, and instead drink green tea with no sugar and just a little bit of fat-free creamer. I know, half and half is terrible for a dieter, fat-free or not. But seriously, you will have to pry that carton of half and half out of my cold dead hands. I cannot stand tea or coffee without it. And if I don't get my coffee or chai, I will start rummaging through the fridge for something to snack on. So instead I drink chai and don't snack on anything.

I watched this documentary, on fat and it was a very eye-opening experience. In this documentary, we follow several people who have either lost weight or are trying to lose weight. We also get to hear from a specialist who studies the digestive tract. The data was surprising. The specialist says there are transmitters in the gut, like neuro-transmitters in the brain, except they're gut-transmitters. He claimed that the gut was like a second brain, I am not joking or exaggerating!

Here is the title. It is available on amazon dot com. FAT: What No One Is Telling You. (2007). PBS Home video.

So anyways, what really caught my eye was the plight of a formerly morbidly obese female comedian. Over the course of a number of years, she lost all her weight, except for some extra pounds that refuse to leave. She went from being mega morbidly obese to moderately overweight! How did she do it? She began to eat small portions of healthy food with little snacking. More incredibly, she exercises for hours each day, without fail! The video showed her slipping into one of those full body work-out suits that make you sweat a lot, and using multiple exercise machines, plus cardio and weight exercises.
'All this so I can be chubby,' she dead-pans.

What is this point of my relating all this to you? Regardless of how you got to weigh what you weigh: life circumstance, medications, metabolism, poor decisions, whatever, you know have a problem you have to deal with. No, it's not fair that people laugh and harass you, make you feel unworthy of love and respect, or that clothes are hard to come by because discrimination is so rampant, but a problem is still a problem that needs to be addressed. This film made me realize that like my homework, I must work harder than the rest just to get an A.

Wish me luck, with some hard work, I can drop another 20 pounds in the following months: then I'll just be a little plump!

A Few Books On Body Image

"Women, Advertising, and Representation: Beyond Familiar Paradigms"; edited by Sue Abel, Marjan deBruin, and Anita Nowak.
I checked out this book this week and my favorite chapter so far is "Lara Croft in Ads", which deals with Lara Croft the video game heroine and her symbolic representation of the ideal woman.

http://www.amazon.com/Women-Advertising-Representation-Paradigms-Communication/dp/1572739274/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311089242&sr=1-1

"The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure To Be Perfect", by Margo Maine and Joe Kelly
http://www.amazon.com/Body-Myth-Adult-Pressure-Perfect/dp/0471691585/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311089315&sr=1-1

Another excellent book, "The Body Myth" deals with the scientific truth behind diets, obesity, and health. This is highly important, as all the doctors I have seen are not keeping up with the current research and studies done on health and weight issues. Instead, they spout the usual doctor rhetoric: if you eat well and exercise you will fall into a healthy BMI range. Not true, especially for a former yo-yo dieter, and a disordered eating person with an abnormal glandular problem (thyroid and pituitary glands). The more you diet, the more likely you will become obese in the future. Sound scary? It's been documented in numerous studies.

"Hungry", by Crystal Renn
http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Appetite-Ambition-Ultimate-Embrace/dp/1439101248/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311089374&sr=1-1

I am buying this book when I get some cash! Crystal Renn is my favorite model, along with Ashley Graham (the top heavy Lane Bryant model), and I recommend watching her NightLine interview on youtube.

Crystal Renn, Plus Size Super Model

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to-1voUiqL0&feature=related

Here is a youtube snippet of the famous supermodel Crystal Renn talking about her life and her new book, Hungry, on Nightline. The stunning brunette was a size 0 model for some time, all the while miserable, her skin sallow and gray, her face placid and dulled from constant hunger, until something inside of her changed. She stopped destroying her health and her happiness and decided to be healthy, not just skinny.

It's women like these who amaze me. I used to be a size 2 at age 19, now a size 16 at age 28. I still have issues showing my present thick body to people from my past. I know they'll judge me as falling off some wagon or losing all control, but it was just a combination of life circumstance and weight gaining medications that caused me to increase in size. I am glad for it, as I can tell who believes the hype and who can think critically just by the way they size me up at first glance.

Watching Crystal Renn gives me confidence to wear a skirt. Yes, I have issues wearing skirts because of my thick thighs. I wore one today. Several men stopped their cars to ask me out. Another just wanted to know my name. Isn't it funny how I let myself be put into a box just because of people's ugly comments? For heaven's sake, it's 100 degrees in the Central Valley, I can't keep wearing jeans because I'm afraid of the way my thighs may look in a skirt!

This is me, changing. This is me, healing, one psychic wound at a time. Thank you, Crystal Renn!

Plus Size YouTube Links

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVRVj4wLxNw

Yes. Lingerie for a woman who lives life not under the mind control of the warped and woman-hating fashion industry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMxyZQfMmM4&feature=related

The infamous Lane Bryant commercial that was banned from television. Why? Television uses fat people all the time, but I guess that's different since they are depicted as undesirable, disgusting, repulsive people who we should all avoid. Maybe it's different when all that flesh is actually an undeniable turn on. It's okay to show lap dancing Victoria Secret models in sheer bras, but a thick, stunning woman with a set of amazing breasts is discriminated against and banned? Is this America or some other repressed country?

Message From a Thick B$&* To Hate-Mongers Maligning My Body

Cruising on youtube for plus size models made me realize how far women need to go to get some basic respect for their thick sisters. On every video there were comments posted belittling the women, calling them fat, attempting to analyze their fat to muscle ratio, claiming they were going to die because of their extra 30 pounds....it just went on and on. What's worse, I know some of these people were women, angry and hate-mongering women who want to raise their self-esteem by destroying the confidence of other women they have deemed inferior.

The one thing that really drove me nuts was some comment where a person wrote that society shouldn't encourage plus-size women because it would just give "fat women the excuse to eat junk food." I've heard this argument all over the place: the fat-is-beautiful movement is mean to skinny women and you shouldn't encourage fat women because they'll think it's okay to eat whatever they want.

Here are some points to consider: $&@@! you.
Point 2: punishing someone who has not committed a crime is unethical and cruel.
Point 3: trying to control a person's life is cruel and violates their right to liberty
Point 4: the fat-is-beautiful movement is not cruel to skinny women. Nobody goes on national  television and talks about skinny women's unhealthy, potentially life-ending disease of anorexia and bulimia. Nobody calls anorexia an "epidemic", though it really is. On the other hand, fat women are constantly bombarded with messages on prime-time TV calling for an end to this "epidemic" of obesity. Furthermore, being fat doesn't doom a person to a quick death or serious heart problems, risks vary from person to person. Here is an article on msnbc that says that thin people are also at risk for heart disease, and that just because a person is thin it means nothing about the health of their internal organs. For example, Zena weighs 100 pounds and drinks shots every weekend, diets on a dangerously minimalist meal (one meal a day with a snack of a carrot with mustard) that is not purely vegetarian and fruits, and smokes cigarettes to keep her weight down. Tammy is 160 pounds, works out 3 times a week for 30 minutes, walks for an hour each day, is a strict vegetarian who gets lots of green vegetables, and is a moderate drinker and doesn't smoke at all. If you're going by the physical outer body, you're not only being a jackass you're also not thinking analytically.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18594089/ns/health-fitness/t/thin-people-can-be-fat-inside/

Point 5: Demeaning, degrading, devaluing, and destroying women and their self-esteem is either a sign that you're a chauvinist or a brainwashed female with a streak of self-hatred.
Point 6: You have no right to tell another person what is and what isn't beautiful. If you don't agree you can click away, you don't have to make derogatory comments about an already marginalized population who experience discrimination on a daily basis.
To reiterate my main point, #$%** you!


~message from a thick bitch.

Electra's Complex 102

Wow, reading that last entry was kind of sad for me.
I didn't mean to vent, I just, well, yeah, I needed to vent.
Anyways this isn't all a suicide survivor blog, it's more like an emotional eating blog, and my issues therein.

But for those of you who run around looking down your nose at obese people, please stop, you have no idea what they have/are going through.

Like I stated in the first blog entry, I whittled myself down from a size 5 to a size 2 at the age of 18 after my uncle's death.

Years later, after being put on Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic drug, I gained a whopping 50 pounds in a very short time span. You may have heard of Zyprexa, it was in the news because hundreds of patients were suing the pharmaceutical company for failing to mention that taking Zyprexa makes one gain upwards of 100 pounds and the drug even causes diabetes in some people. Everyone who was on Zyprexa that I know of had nothing kind to say about it: "It worked, yeah, but I got diabetes now!" It seems the rush to market a miracle sanity drug was a bad move on the part of pharmaceutical companies, a decision that cost lots of people their physical health. Myself, I suffered a huge weight gain from my pre-Zyprexa normal weight of 115 to 160 lbs.
I remember being chastised by an art teacher on my bad eating habits after I brought in a fast food breakfast. I just nodded and went along with it. She didn't know that the pills were making me feel super hungry, especially for foods high in fat, that the pills likely slowed my metabolism down, and that I normally didn't eat at Carl's Jr for breakfast. The rest of the class stared at my new flabby gut and then looked away. I could feel the disgust. I felt it myself. So from that point on, at the age of 22, I began to yo yo diet, binge eat, starve, exercise, and binge eat more. I went of my medication, then back on, then back off, then back on....

At one point, when I was feeling very disliked in my lowly post as a pizza delivery girl, I managed to drop my weight down to 134, slightly acceptable for my height (5'1), but just barely. Of course, I was eating nothing for breakfast, coffee and a small salad for lunch, and a slice of pizza for dinner.  On the outside I had done what society wanted me to do: lose weight. I was no longer a blemish on the face of American culture. No longer another statistic of fat women. I was acceptable. Behind the facade, I was a wreck. I was stuck in an abusive relationship with my high school science lab partner, skipping my medication, and beginning to hear voices telling me how horrible I was. My mother, thankfully, insisted I be admitted to the county psychiatric facility. I slowly improved with medication and distanced myself from that abusive person.
Unfortunately, my weight increased. There's a well known government study that proves if a person starves themselves the body will begin to hoard calories away like  a squirrel with nuts. Once you eat, it is nearly impossible to burn off those calories, as your body knows that you may starve at any time. It's natural. Can't outwit biology. I gained all my weight back, and then some.

I'm 28 now and I've returned to the University as a senior to complete my BA. By the time mid-terms hit, I was sitting around studying for hours, not getting enough exercise aside from daily long walks, and I reached 194. That's obese. I panicked. I began running and dieting. I stopped running because I had such large breasts that people would comment, or leer at me. I went down by about 30 pounds in a matter of months. I was suddenly more energetic and I felt good about myself because I wasn't eating animal meat anymore, which I always considered to be a cruel practice.

So anyways, here I am, medicated, grieving over my lost cousin, and eating a salad with spicy ranch. I weigh 173. That's up from last week, before I was told about my cousin's suicide, but my weight is significantly lower than my worst point.

Yes, I know, Ranch dressing has lots of calories. But I walk around in 100 degree heat for hours because I have no car, so I figure I am burning off those Ranch calories.

Anyways, now you know most of me. The rest of this blog will be on random topics. Mostly, I want to explore my health, both physical and mental. I will be posting lists of books I've read that helped me through difficult times, some good vegetarian recipes, places to buy bras that cater to big breasted women, and blog posts chronicling my struggle with life and death.

Mostly I started this blog because I couldn't find a forum that addressed the issues I find most pressing: how to cope with hardships without taking it out on your body. How to adjust to a highly stigmatized mental illness. How to lose weight without developing an eating disorder. How to exist happily with myself while acknowledging that I don't always make the best decisions for myself.

The next blog will be on a lighter note: how to find a bra that fits.