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!

On weight, anti-psychotics, suicide, and metabolism

I have found an interesting and entertaining documentary concerning the existence of obesity. I hope that you already know why so many people are obese: the obesity gene began as a way of our early ancestors to survive through periods of famine without dying. A thin person would simply die, but an obese person would be able to live off all of their stored-up fat and still be able to bear children. This kept the human species alive for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Then, with the advent of food and medical technology, being obese was no longer an evolutionary advantage. Being thin became an advantage, especially a social advantage.

This documentary is available for free streaming on top documentary films dot com, and you can also find it on youtube. It's called "Why are thin people not fat?" Here is the link:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/why-are-thin-people-not-fat/
In this film the audience follows a group of naturally below-average-weight individuals who are put onto a daily caloric diet more than twice their previous diet. You may have heard of a previous experiment like this one. Prior to this film, there was a 1960's prison experiment where prisoners were allowed to leave prison early if they could get fat--some ate up to 10,000 calories a day (versus the 2,000 recommended caloric intake for males), and to the researchers' surprise, some failed to get fat.
The researchers in this documentary are looking into why some people can get fat and others can't. It's a very interesting watch, and I, as a thick woman, feel a little vindicated to finally see media that says people are genetically different, not just their genes but their metabolic rates as well (metabolism=how fast you burn calories, be it through exercise or transformation of calories into heat).

For myself I know what makes me fat: 1) hypothyroidism, which is a slowing down of my metabolic rate combined with low body temperature. This means that I can't burn off fat by converting it into heat because my body remains at a cool temperature. Also, the ability to burn off those calories through exercise is difficult, due to my slow metabolism.
At the moment, I'm not on synthroid, though I was in the past, due to the fact that health care in America is a murky swamp of paperwork and employment through which one must wade into to get the health care you need. Being unemployed, this makes health care impossible. Free clinics get booked so quickly that there is a 6 month wait period to see a doctor in the Central Valley of California where I live, with no guarantee that you're getting adequate health care. Now that I'm a student, I plan on making a trip to the campus physician to get my long-postponed prescription to treat my hypothyroidism.
2) Anti-psychotic medications, which I need to treat my schizo-affective disorder . Yes, I'm mentally ill, but you wouldn't be able to tell unless I'm acutely psychotic, which isn't that often off medication and doesn't happen at all on medication, so don't stigmatize me---I'm not a psychopath who goes berserk on innocent people. I also don't wander around town shouting obscenities; that's a different disorder. Nor do I accost random people to spout conspiracy theories, curse at them, or whatever preconception you have of mentally ill people. I just have different perceptions which scare me. But back to the topic: zyprexa pills are much like snicker's bars in that you will pack on weight if you eat one every day. I was on zyprexa for about a year, so imagine that. Hence, how I went from a moderate size 5 to a size 16 in less than five years. There is still research being done on why anti-psychotics cause extreme weight gain, some of which I believe (my opinion here) that some of the findings are being kept in the dark due to pressure and financing from major pharmaceutical companies. If you think that sounds like a paranoid talking (and, well, I am) then you should google Zoloft  and suicide risk and read the studies that were withheld until the relatives of suicides came forward and sued the pharmaceutical company for not disclosing that Zoloft increases the risk of suicidal behavior, especially in the initial period when medication is first taken.

Having just lost a cousin to suicide, I was not surprised to hear he was starting medication for depression. Frankly, I think the doctor and pharmaceutical company are liable for my cousin's death, but it's not my call at the moment. Plus, I'm still in mourning and I don't feel like thinking about who is to blame for the suicide of a 24 year old male with no history of suicide attempts (most suicides have a history of botched attempted suicide, they usually don't just kill themselves out of the blue). But now

I'm getting angry, so I'll change the subject: anti-psychotic medications made me gain weight. No, it wasn't lack of self-discipline or lack of exercise. I ate what I ate before. I admit, I liked pizza before and after my new medication, but I had never packed on more than 5 pounds for this indulgence. So I ate what I ate before, did my usual running before work, walked for miles during the day, and boom! 50 pounds settled on my short frame rapidly. Suspiciously rapidly. I had never had a problem with my weight before Zyprexa and all the other drugs I've been on (Geodon, Zoloft, Seroquel, Paxil, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Abilify, Zoloft-generics, and a host of others whose names I've forgotten). The moment I started taking the pills I began to plump up so quickly I began to think of myself as a puffer fish, you know, that one fish that expands into a balloon when you frighten it. ( image:http://www.google.com/search?q=puffer+fish&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=576&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=BLEjTq-NPIHkiALCuLzOAw&sqi=2&ved=0CCsQsAQ)

Now, having been on heavy anti-psychotics off and on from the age of 23-24 to my current age of 28, I have found that every time I get OFF my medication I immediately begin to slim down. Several years ago I went off my medication, lost 15-20 pounds in a matter of months, got a little zealous, began a starvation diet, lost another 15 pounds, then, unsurprisingly, went mad, got quarantined in a psychiatric facility,  was forced to take weight-gaining anti-psychotic medications, along with having my diet monitored to the point where I was not allowed to leave the cafeteria without eating a certain percentage of my plate, and gained all my weight back again. I was so close to weighing 125! So close. But then I would have been a slim nutcase and the county psychiatrist thought that would be a liability.

So I learned that I must have some sort of borderline diet crazed mentality in order to reduce my pudgy body to a moderately overweight frame if I plan on being compliant with psychiatric treatment. Being both hypothyroid and on a steady diet of multiple psychotropic medications, I am competing with a natural propensity towards obesity, so the best I can do without developing a severe eating disorder is to be slightly overweight---and even that requires a minimalist, sugar-free diet mixed with excessive exercise and the high-end anti-psychotics that claim to have less side effects.

Here's an example of a typical diet day:
no breakfast.
If I eat breakfast it's always half a cup of yogurt. I then drink about 3-4 cups of coffee to keep me energized until lunch.
Lunch=small plate of zucchini with lots of spices to trick my taste buds into believing I'm eating something delicious, + 1-2 cups of chai (tea with milk). Snack=nothing.
Dinner=small portion of whatever I want. This can be more zucchini, but usually it's something a little greasier like a handful of home-made cumin fries with a salad or veggie burger with a piece of buttery garlic bread. I then drink 3 cups of tea to trick my body into feeling totally stuffed, and into bed I go. I wake up, weigh myself, and spend the rest of the day going to class, caring for my grandmother, doing my homework, and hunting down either a salad or a cup of coffee to chase away the hunger.

If you're wondering why I eat fries, the answer is simple: they taste good, they're everywhere, and I will cave in and binge eat if I abstain from eating comfort foods for more than a month. Sugar I don't like, and I rarely eat cake or ice cream unless it's my birthday or my relative's birthday, but butter---that's my achille's heel. So I eat it in moderation and not every day, or week for that matter. But when I do eat it, I feel guilty. Right now, there's a box of garlic bread in the freezer that is singing siren songs to me, but I already ate dinner so I must boil 4 cups of tea and drink until I feel full. Yes, this vegetarian, chai diet actually works: I've lost somewhere between 12-20 pounds since I started it this April. I can't be exactly sure since I didn't buy a new weighing scale until May something, and the initial weight loss occurs very quickly at the beginning (and then slows down...), but I do know that a month ago I weighed 179 and my weight this morning read 169. I can now fit into a size 14, but just barely. Oh yeah, on top of the diet, I walk to and from the bus stop (30 minutes each way) all week long, plus one hour of continuous power walking every day, plus 20 minutes on a rowing machine three times a week, plus 10-15 minutes of using a 10 pound weight one to two times a week. All this...and still on the borderline between overweight and obese. On the plus size, my internal organs will be in great shape in time for the beginning of my new judo class this fall semester, even though I can't wear a bathing suit because I'll still be too fat.