My Bathroom Scale Sneaked into my Bedroom

My bathroom scale sneaked into my bedroom this month. It now sits in front of my reading chair, like a bizarre ottoman. Sometimes I even rest my feet on it while I read this spy thriller, "At Risk." In order to get to my reading chair I have to step over the scale. Usually, I wind up sitting on my chair, thinking about my weight. I could take about how  weight is another corset for modern women, or how people discriminate against people who are overweight but I will not (at least not right now).

Right now, I would like to devote a little entry to the topic of why I want to lose weight. I want to look like Marilyn Monroe. End of blog, lol.

I still remember that day in the psychiatric facility, three years ago and 25 pounds ago. My social worker was telling me about my axis. Axis 1 is like one diagnosis, Axis 2 is another diagnosis. In medical jargon, it is essentially "things that are horribly wrong with you in a tidy little list." My axis said I was schizo-affective. Then, horribly, he said my other axis was clinical obesity. I knew I was overweight. I was about 184 pounds and only 5 feet, 2 inches, but obese? I thought obese was for women who could only wear mumus and whose arms were the width of my thighs. I know better know, but back then it was a terrible shock. Not only was I crazy, I was fat as well.

Two to three years later I am still schizo-affective. However, I am only clinically overweight now and not obese. I have lost 25 pounds since that initial diagnosis. My weight yesterday was 159 pounds, down from 184, which was not even the "peak" of my weight (my first semester of University I packed on pounds during finals week). I can never go back to not exercising for a minimum of 20 minutes daily, plus one hour walks, or I will gain everything back. I can also never return to eating 2,000 calories or more a day, ever. My body adjusted to getting 1800, then 1600, now 1300 calories a day. To shove in 2,000 calories would probably lead to significant amounts of weight gain. I will just get used to limiting my caloric intake. Cut fast food consumption. Cut what fast food I do eat into halves and eat only half. My staples are no longer home-cooked chicken and sandwiches. Now, my main staples are sauteed zucchini, cucumber sprayed with olive oil and flavored with Splenda packets, plain yogurt with Splenda packets, boiled and sauteed cauliflower with cumin, cayenne, and coriander spices, cereal, oatmeal, and tomato with roasted bell pepper and cheese sandwiches. When I eat fast food I either make sure I have had less than 2,000 calories for the day, or I feel really guilty and decrease my calories for the following day.

Maybe you can tell, I have not eaten breakfast yet, which is why I am rambling on about food. I am planning on having half a packet of instant oatmeal. Only half a packet because I will be baby-sitting my elderly grandmother for half of today, which means no taking hour long walks and doing morning exercise on my stationary bike. Maybe for a snack, a peach. Then for another snack, red-leaf chard lettuce mixed with mandarin oranges and a low calorie spritzer. Then lunch....dreading having to choose something for lunch. Then, a cucumber with olive oil and splenda. I like splenda on my cucumber because it makes the cucumber taste like fruit.

My goal for this summer is to lose 20 pounds. I will likely only lose 5 pounds, but whatever, at least I set a goal for myself. So if you ever stop by this little blog and see like four entries in a row of random meals, listed like some kind of restaurant menu, that is because I am concentrating my energy on losing more weight. 159 is less than 184, but not by that much. I want to reach 139 pounds. No wait, I will reach 139 pounds.

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

Finals Week on Campus

Some people go to a confessional booth to see a priest. I am not that religious. Instead, I come to cyberspace to spit out my secrets, hoping somebody somewhere will absolve me.

My mother would be so ashamed of me, keeping my life open like some kind of tart.

I should really be studying for finals right now. I will, I'm not that lazy. I've just written about 30 pages of research for my undergrad classes and I feel like I should take a breather, just until 9 tonight.

I have nothing dramatic to say, I quit with the melodrama last summer when I broke up with an insensitive male lover. Instead, I am going to talk about my life goals. Why? I dunno. If you're looking for something more daring, please read "Confessions of a Closet Schizophrenic" or "Confessions of a Closet Bisexual" that I wrote a few months back.

I completed all but one of my lower and upper division general education classes already. Next semester I have 2 linguistics classes, 2 foreign language classes, and 1 theory of dance class that fulfills the last of my general education requirements. Then I graduate. What I do after I graduate is unknown, as the job prospects are limited for somebody who only has a B.A. This economy isn't ideal, to say the least.

Saturday I am going to the campus library to study for hours. My friend will hopefully join me so we can rent one of those rooms with a whiteboard. Sunday I am going to the library to study. Monday I am going early so I can go to the library and study. Then I take my phonology final. Then I go back to studying a foreign language, a class which was going well until my grandfather died right before Thanksgiving. I have to memorize 20 sentences worth of dialogue, including spelling, in a non-romance language. After this, I should only have my Chinese final to prepare for.


There's this yahoo gossip column about some female student who went berserk in the library at another CSU (or was it UC?). She snapped over the loudness of somebody's breathing and started hollering all over the place. Man, I am glad I tend to isolate when I get stressed out or there might be some kind of viral video of me curling up in fetal position under a desk  in the library, muttering poorly enunciated Chinese words to no one.

Finals week sucks.

One student in my French 2B class last semester told me she had a breakdown every semester. She showed up for our project red-eyed and still puffy from sobbing. "I've been on a crying jag for a few hours," she admitted. She was in the graduate program for music. I gently asked her if she might consider an anti-depressant but she laughed me off. She's out there somewhere, having another nervous breakdown. I guess this is me having my break down.

When I have breakdowns I stuff them down by eating too much. That's probably why I gained the weight back I lost taking that martial arts class. I was 159 about 3 weeks ago, and now I'm 161. I tend to be an anxiety-eater. You know the type, the type that tries to be really pleasant and helpful to everyone but eats in binges until the stressful event passes. That was me last week. I didn't have enough Zoloft, my grandpa had just died, my grades were falling from A's to low B's, and it was about to be finals week. So I ate. I ate a hamburger from McDonalds---and I'm a vegetarian! I ate 230 calories worth of salty french fries with that stupid hamburger. In the middle of the night I went foraging for rice cakes. Yes, those are only like 50 calories for 2, but I ate like 6 or 8!

Today I tried to control my caloric intake by avoiding eating with my family and instead munching on 3 pieces of sushi for lunch. Then I saw my therapist, who gently goaded me to accept my life as it is now. She said it's okay to overeat on occasion, so long as it's only during finals week. But last finals week I ballooned up to 190 pounds and it took me from April to September to climb down to 160 pounds.

I feel that food is like the only thing keeping me from curling into a ball in bed and refusing to take my finals. Well, that and coffee....lots and lots of coffee. Like 8 cups of coffee a day. Therapist also said to cut back on the coffee. If only I could! It tastes so good with splenda and some half and half. Yes, I know, half and half won't help me lose weight, but I need my caffeine fix so I just delete a snack for the day and pour in some creamer without remorse.

Tonight I am going to write a list of all the Chinese characters we have learned over the semester and begin to copy them over and over and over again. Plus, I will read through the chapters in my phonology book. Then I will take an anti-anxiety drug and go to sleep. Ah, the pleasure of psychotropic medications. It's funny, people who are medicated get this rap for being unstable, but if anything we are so medicated we're the most stable in the room! Where one person starts yelling about people breathing too loud, I just take my medication early and nap away the stress. Is that healthy? Oh who cares, this is a Prozac Nation anyways (read the book, too!).

Wasted, Read it!

I read "Wasted" by Marya Hornbacher a while back but I only recently purchased it.

She is at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to food. I tend to cycle between binge eating and excessive dieting while she has struggled with anorexia and bulimia. "Wasted" chronicles her experiences with the two disorders. The book is poignant, interesting, and her style of writing flows freely and easily from her finger tips. She also wrote one on being bipolar that's titled, "Madness: a Memoir." My favorite part is when she is released from a treatment center for a few hours to attend college and she always has to run off quickly before anybody discovers that she's part of an in-patient program.

I empathize with her because I spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals for bouts of mania. I never told my teachers that I wasn't just ditching their class for two weeks...I was sick. Instead, I'd just sort of waltz in and take my old seat without so much as a hello. Of course, my grades suffered each time the paramedics would cart me off on a stretcher with leather wrist cuffs, but I guess that's the price you pay for denial of illness.

The writer does mention an incident where an overweight woman called her chunky, ("just like me," she said to Marya.) and I have to address that. Of course you're not chunky, Marya, and if you were you'd still be a great writer. That woman probably felt really lonely in her castle of flesh and wanted, perhaps irrationally, to be close to you. I doubt she was being cruel. She probably wanted to feel less alone in her pudgy life. Trust me, I should know (I've never called anybody chunky, but still).

The truth is, eating disorders have things in common. This might shock and offend and piss off anorectics everywhere, but it's true: binge eating, anorexia, bulimia, bulimirexia all have a common thread of food obsession, control issues, and emotional issues. All 3 disorders can be precipitated by traumatic life events and are aggravated by stress. Of course, one is more socially acceptable than the others.

Here some people would disagree. They would look around and see this "plus size movement" as proof that there has been a backlash against skinny. Well, tell the fashion editor, the majority of the population, women's clothing manufacturers, and the guy down the street THAT and you'll see how little truth there is to this "pro-fat" movement. Take a classroom of females, one extremely skinny and one extremely fat, and ask them to describe negative comments, looks, and experiences their weight has caused them. Yes, both will have some. But it's likely that the fat woman is more likely to get comments from strangers, doctors, and family more often than not.

Having starved myself to a size 2 and binge eaten to a size 16, I vividly recall many more cruel weight comments when I'm fat. Plus I  have to deal with knocking all kinds of things over with my huge butt. Once, I scrambled out of my classroom desk for a break and almost tipped the thing over with my butt! Desks were obviously not intended for the thick women in the world.

But back to the book, it was totally engrossing and I highly recommend it.

Wasted by Marya Hornbacher---read it!

Electra's Complex 101

If you don't like confessional-style, soap opera lives please click "next blog." 

This blog is my way of coping with the loss of my cousin to suicide. We lived together for several years before he moved back with his mother and I hadn't seen him for 2 years when I got the news from his father that he had committed suicide. I don't mean to start off on a sad note, but it's important that anybody who reads this understands that I'm coming from a place of mourning and confusion.

In the aftermath last week, I binge ate and regained 6 pounds I had lost through a vegetarian diet and exercise.I couldn't help my cousin and it seemed like I couldn't help myself either. I stuffed BBQ chicken into my mouth at the park where our two families met to mourn. I gulped down bites of rice. The next day, we got pizza and I ate 3 slices for lunch and 3 slices for dinner. My new, healthy lifestyle went out the window for about 3 days.

I've always had issues with food; I'm an emotional eater, or dieter, it depends. When I lost one of my uncles to a tragic accident at the age of 18, I stopped eating. I sought counseling at the University psych services, and though the intern there flaked on me, he did give me some good advice: find something you can swallow and eat it someplace safe. That turned out to be chicken nuggets with me eating them in the very back of the fast food joint, out of sight. I went down to a size 2.

I came back to my home town after losing my housing accommodations and began to party like crazy. Sex was my new issue. I had lots of it. I ran around to various house parties, met up with random guys, and slept with them. My friend was disgusted. My mother was horrified (we're a traditional Mexican-American family).  I was on the verge of  a nervous breakdown from all the sex, drugs, and rock n roll.

Then I lost it and took a bunch of pills. That was my first experience with a psychiatric hospital. I was labeled bipolar, drugged up, and released. Later, a more specific diagnosis would be given to me: schizo-affective disorder, meaning when I get manic, I stop sleeping and I wind up psychotic. I'm not a bad person, I've never been in a fight and I'm not delinquent. I'm just nuts. Hence, the Electra Complex (Also, my father left before I was born so I figured this would be a good title.)



Please stay tuned for part 2. My mother is home and I have to go buy some Coriander powder and zucchini.
Thanks for reading, and I hope I haven't depressed you too too much!