Gained 2 Pounds, Lost 3 in Past Week

Earlier this week I was 171 pounds. Yikes. Now, about a week later, I weighed myself and weighed 168. This is obese for my height. I am disgusted. Still, at least I am not 171 anymore. I have to give myself credit for each pound that comes off or else I will just cry and give up.

Since I gained 20+ pounds on my ex-boyfriend's fried salmon dinners, I have struggled even more with my weight. I shot from 148 pounds to 174 pounds. My average weight prior to having a boyfriend was 153-155. My low weight was 148 this past year. Now, my low weight for the past 5 months has been 164. GRRRR.

I cannot believe I let myself eat my ex-boyfriend's junk food. It was Arabic food--nothing but rice, potatoes, and either fried chicken or fried fish. We broke up last January. Since then I have been taking 2 martial arts classes for a total of 4 hours each week of hard core work outs. Weight lost? Maybe 5 pounds. On a good day.

I think my body is in a little bit of shock due to my weight fluctuations. Since 2011, I lost 40 to 46 pounds. Then, between October of 2012 to January of 2013, I gained 25 pounds. Then, from January 2013 to May 2013 I lost 5 to 10 pounds. Then, from May 2013 to June 2013, I gained 5 pounds. Then, this past week, I lost 3 pounds. Yo-yo dieting takes on new meaning for me. It is more like bungee-jumping dieting.

I ate 1250 calories yesterday. I walked for 1 hour twice yesterday. I fought my punching bag for 20 minutes yesterday. I really did take two cups of popped popcorn to my room for my midnight eating disorder time. I woke up in the early morning and ate all of it. Thankfully, I had already included those 200 calories into my caloric intake journal, so I was not eating too, too much.


1200 calories is my limit. I don't want to eat more than 1200 and I refuse to eat less. If I want to reduce how many calories are in my body, I will work out. I have to eat 1200 or else my body will go into more shock and I dread how my weight will shift and fluctuate after a starvation diet (I succumbed to a starvation diet about 5 years ago and was 131 pounds down oh, I don't know, maybe 50 pounds before the psychiatric hospital intervened, forced me onto weight gaining anti-psychotic pills, quarantined me in a locked room without the usual running and walking I  had been doing, and forced me to eat three times a day). So, lesson learned; no starvation diet. Only calorie restriction and excessive exercise.

Yesterday my snack was a raw roma tomato sliced with black pepper and a tablespoon of olive oil drizzled on it. I felt a little guilty about the olive oil, too. It was not half bad. I think that snack is a bit better than my previous tomato snack/lunch of tomato, olive oil, and chevre melted on top.

Today, more tomatoes, punching bag, and oatmeal. Wish me luck. My goal is to weigh 155 by the end of August.

Finals Over, Diet Begins

Every finals week I start to binge eat. I cannot stop. I will literally sleepwalk out of bed and rummage through the kitchen in the dark and stuff whatever there is into my mouth and crawl back into bed. I woke up once with little graham crackers packages littered all over and crumbs in my bed. Then, the guilt, the all-consuming remorse, the weight gain, the looming diet in my near future.

Well, finals week is over. I failed pre-calculus. The professor posted a message online saying that it was very common to have to take his class twice. That did little to quell my feelings of failure. I had just gained about 3 pounds during finals week. To fail AND to gain weight. No. Bad. The rest of my classes were A's and B's, but that class dropped my cumulative GPA significantly. Now, it is summer, I am not working, I have a lot of free time, and my primary goal is to lose weight.

In 2011 I weighed 194 pounds and I was at my heaviest. In 2012 I weighed 155 pounds, having dropped around 40 pounds in a year. Then, I dated some guy who liked to fry all his dinners and he was always making me dinner---I gained 15 pounds. Then, we broke up and I felt completely dumb for letting him stuff me full of deep fried salmon just to be polite about his cooking. Never again, I vowed. I enrolled  in martial arts classes, but alas, I still gained weight over midterms and the dreaded week of finals. Now, at 167, I am back to being at the borderline between obese and very overweight on the BMI chart. 

At 167 pounds my pants fit, which is not good. I was starting to get used to the loose waistband and the need for a new wardrobe. I am determined to lose at least 20 pounds before the end of August. I did it before, I can do it now. 

My diet since I got out of class about a week ago has been dramatically altered from my high caloric finals-week-diet. Now, I drink a lot of tea and I wait until after 6 pm to have a normal sized meal. By "a lot of tea" I mean somewhere around 6 cups during the day and another 3 cups of green tea at night. I always put a bit of fat free half and half or almond milk in each cup, which does add calories, but that 10 calories per cup (or 100 calories per day) is equivalent to a small, single snack. I run on chai (tea). 

For example, today I had 3 cups of coffee, 1 cup of tea, 2 plain flour tortillas for breakfast, and a large diet Coke from McDonalds. It is 1:30 pm and I kind of feel full. I have no desire to eat more flour tortillas, even though my relative just finished making delicious home-made tortillas from scratch. 

Dieting is an old friend for me. I think to some extent it is healthy, but then again, maybe having 2 tortillas for breakfast isn't healthy and also those are pure carbohydrates. For lunch I will have a nice tomato and cheese sandwich on flat bread, followed by 5 cups of tea with fat free half and half. Maybe some shots of espresso after that...who knows? If you're trying to lose weight, see a doctor. I am not a doctor. I am just a desperate, unemployed graduate student with little money and little control over my life. I am only relaying this information because I want this blog to be as honest with the reader as I can be. I know that obsessing about weight is never good. I applaud those women who are free from the self-disgust I feel. I also know that I have body issues, food issues, and overall issues. This blog was started to show the real human behind mental illness (I am schizo-affective who gained a lot of weight taking the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa). Now that it has been a year, I still want this blog to be honest, even if that means showing my ugly bits. 

To some people, summer is a time to relax. For me, it is the time when I exercise daily and limit my calories. Sometimes, summer also involves getting involved with some guy and maybe even smoking marijuana now and then. I would prefer not to smoke marijuana or get involved with some random guy for three months, but that has been my pattern for the past 3 years. Maybe I will sign up for classes at the dojo near my house. :) Cheers to summer, kickboxing, espresso, tea, and you!!

I Lost 1 More Pound and My History as Big Hips Woman

I lost one more pound for a total of 5 pounds. I am pleased. My big hips still have love handles, though.

I was reading this viral blog post about this girl who posted her picture on a blog. She was very pretty and heavy. Her blog post went on a tirade against people who have been mean to her because of her weight and how she is sick of hiding her body because other people don't like to see fat. In the photo she was in her bra and underwear.

My facebook friend posted it on her wall and I read the story. It resonated with me. I still remember strange men making comments about me being "too fat" to my face as I walked by.


*************Bio of Big Hips Woman**************
Unlike the blogger, I was never overweight as a child or young adult. I gained weight at the age of 23, but when I gained weight I gained a lot of it due to the effects of Zyprexa medication and a bad diet that I have had since my childhood.

Since then, I have been on a mini-crusade trying to get rid of the fat. At some points, I succeeded. About 4 to 5 years ago, I went on a crash diet and lost so much weight I went from a size 14 to about 130 pounds, or maybe a size 8. I never bought new clothes so I never found out exactly what size I turned into. Instead, I'd wear size 10 and size 12 pants with a big belt to keep them up. I lost a lot of weight but I did so by not taking the Zyprexa medicine and through a starvation diet. Naturally, being a schizo-affective with a propensity towards mania when unmedicated, I became floridly psychotic and was plucked from my daily routine of food obsession and food denial and locked in a psychiatric facility. I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks and when I got out I just kept gaining it back, plus some extra.

I paid for weight training classes at the community college. I seriously worked out 3 times a week but the amount of weight I gained after dieting was too much and the exercise barely made a dent. I was in a class with only 2 other women. One had a tiny waist, bone-like arms, and huge breast implants. The other was a very thin, waif-like girl. Sometimes they would come into the mat room where I liked to hide doing my sit-ups and sit down along the wall, stare at me periodically, whisper and laugh. I don't care if they weren't talking about me, the looks on their faces and their obvious stares was enough to make me want to cry. Ironic that they were taking a weight lifting class but all they did was sit around, watch me and talk. Meanwhile, I was doing endless crunches and pedaling like a maniac on a stationary bike. Then came the horrible day when I ran into my old friend who had last seen me a few years ago when I was still about 115 pounds. She congratulated me on my baby. I felt ridiculous. "I'm not pregnant, just fat," I said. She apologized profusely but the damage had been done.

I continued with intermittent periods of intense exercise. I walked for hours every day for years but that never paid off. I would periodically run for hours but the weight wouldn't budge and my knees would ache for days afterwards. I would do yoga, lift a 10 pound weight, and I also took a semester of modern dance from the community college. This entire time I was doing manual labor and staying on my feet for 3-5 hours a day at my part-time job. Nothing worked.

Fast forward a few years: I was a returning student to the University. I  had just gotten out of "reintegration rehabilitation" for mental patients. It was an out-patient all-day 6 month bonanza of group therapy, art therapy, and lectures about how to deal with mental illness symptoms without resorting to drugs or relapsing. Through the whole thing there were catty females in the program who would chant obsessively that they didn't want to get fat. Luckily, they had no jobs or anything else to do during the day except to diet and depend on their men to support them. I notice that when people fail at the basic things in life like employment, education, and relationships, they always tend to fall back on the food thing. Anyways, I went to the University, concentrated on succeeding, ignored my food consumption, and gained 15 to 20 pounds. Hitting 194 was a bleak day for me. I dropped meat out of my diet and started monitoring how many calories everything had and I dropped to 181 in about a month and a half.

The next two years I exercised like I was training for a professional MMA match. I took judo twice a week for six months. On top of this, I used my stationary bike for an hour. I also used my mechanical rowing machine for at least 30 minutes. I walked for hours every day. By the end of my first year back at the University I had dropped 40 pounds and was 151 pounds. The next semester I took a modern dance class with many stereotypical dancer-type females. You know what I mean, the ones that took ballet in their youth and never took to a normal people diet. The type who think weight is a matter of self-discipline and not being a sloth. It was painful but I endured and danced and danced and got an A. Next, I dated an Arabian guy who kept feeding me deep-fried salmon, white rice, and potatoes. I gained 20 pounds.

I decided action must be taken, swift, brutal action. I enrolled in 1 hour of karate twice a week followed immediately by 1 hour of kick-boxing twice a week. On the weekends, I use a punching bag I bought for myself and  I still walk for hours every day. The result? The weight didn't budge until just now. 5 measly pounds. 5. Yes, 5 pounds. I'm 168 now, in the obese range. I am obese but I can flip you over my shoulder and throw you to the mat, I can do karate katas, and I can throw a nasty cross, hook, and a violent roundhouse. This isn't air-punching, cardio stuff, this is grab your sparring partner and flip them onto their backs. This is stand there and let your sparring partner lift you into the air so you fall on your back really hard, then get up and do it again. This is full-force roundhouse kicks on your sparring partner's command, your leg hitting pads as hard as it can. This is non-stop jabs, hooks, crosses, front kicks, roundhouse kicks, elbows, knees hitting the pads as fast and as hard as you can.

I've decided to keep up the martial arts routine, not because I am losing weight, but because I love it. I still want to lose weight, just so society will shut up about my body. Primarily, though, I want to lose enough weight to get into the main women's fighting division which is 136-144 pounds. That's where all dem tuff chicks are.I can't wait until I am up there taking real hits and giving real hits in a real competition. If I have to go on a parsley diet, or a 6 pm diet, so be it. I have so much determination that never showed on my figure, only in my eyes. One day, that slender sporty girl will be in the ring with me and she will suddenly realize that all those layers of fat were hiding hours and hours of training. That, just to be the weight I will be, I had to work five times harder than she trained for  and 5 times longer. She will realize that those years of being fat made me hard, made me angry, made me endure things she could not. I will tell her beforehand, "I used to be 194 pounds. I lost weight so I could sock you in the face a whole bunch of times. :)" And it will be true.

That is my bio as big hips woman. Thank you for reading. ~Electra

4 pounds lost in 4 days; 50 more to go

4 days ago I weighed 172. This made me sad. Last semester I weighed 152. This semester I took 2 martial arts classes twice a week, for a total of 4 hours. Regardless of how much I exercised, I still gained 10 pounds on top of the 10 pounds I gained over winter break. That's a total of 20 pounds since November.

This isn't my first extreme weight gain or weight loss adventure. I have been plagued by my weight since the psychiatrists put me on Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic with massive weight gain as a common side effect. I only made it worse by not modifying my pre-Zyprexa diet of junk food. Before Zyprexa I could eat what I felt like but afterwards, I had to learn the hard way that my body craved more food than I needed and needed twice the exercise due to the chemical effects of the pills I took.

My first semester returning to University in 2011 I gained so much weight I was 194 at my fattest. By mid-2012 I weighed 151 pounds. I lost over 40 pounds in a year by eating less than 2000 calories a day, moderate exercise, a lot of walking, and a semi-vegetarian diet (some fish, some chicken, a lot of half and half).

Even now, I'm 24 pounds lighter than my worst weight. But that is equivalent to 50 pounds heavier than my weight at age 23: 118. Now, nearly thirty years old, I am fearful that I will go back to 194 pounds and that I'll never reach my goal of being 125-130 pounds.

I decided to really get serious. Yes, maybe it is because I have fallen behind in my computer programming class and I have a deep-seated insecurity about my grades to the point where body obsession is a preferred mode of escape, but whatever, I'm going to lose weight.

I started a 6:00 pm diet. By this I mean that I get to eat an entire meal after 6 pm. Why 6 pm? Because I tend to stress out at night and this is when I am at risk for binge eating and midnight snacking. I know nutritionists say that eating heavy foods at night makes you gain weight, but I have no self-control after 7 pm anyways, at least this way I may lose some weight by trimming down on my day-time calorie consumption.

Here's how I lost 4 pounds in 4 days

9 am: drink a Kellog's Special K protein shake (180 calories)
10:00-3:00 pm = classes on campus with only one hour break. Spend this one hour sipping on coffee (80 calories).
4:00 pm = getting hungry. Good thing I brought another Special K protein shake (180 calories)
5:00 pm = one last Americano from Starbucks with a lot of half and half and splenda (100 calories)
6:00 pm = time to feast. I am at 600 calories total for the day. I get to eat 600 calories for dinner, for a total of 1200 calories. This can be a moderate serving of pasta and maybe one slice of bread, a couple of home made tacos, a Subway sandwich, 2 slices of pizza, 1 jr cheeseburger from Wendys and 5 spicy chicken nuggets, or 2 tamales from the Mexican restaurant.

I did that for 4 days and I've lost 4 pounds. In fact, I think I ate like 1600 calories on one day and still lost a pound.

I am only doing this because I am in the obese range on the BMI. I would never suggest this 6 pm diet for anybody not in the obese range. For those who are in the obese range, I still wouldn't recommend this because it may be crash dieting and that is super dangerous. That being said, I want to lose weight. I will accept the fatigue, the headaches, the lethargy, the scattered concentration, and the stomach growling so long as I lose the weight.

I was going to delete this blog post right now, but I did promise to tell the truth on this blog, no matter how uncomfortable the truth might be. So here is the ugly truth---I am losing weight. I will live off Roma tomatoes, I will lose weight if I have to pump pure caffeine into my veins to keep myself from collapsing into a deep, hungry sleep, I will lose weight. I will.
HIGH WEIGHT= 194
CURRENT WEIGHT=168
GOAL WEIGHT=130
If I can't succeed in graduate school at least I'll leave a size 8.

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??

Return of the Love Handles

I finally jumped on the bathroom scale. My worst fear came true. Despite two hours of martial arts practice twice a week, I have somehow gained 6 more pounds. I think this might be because I am so famished after stumbling out of the two hour ordeal that I rush towards the student union’s food court and stuff myself with junk food.

Currently, I am 15 pounds heavier than I was last semester.  I was 152 in the fall. Now my fat is really making me hate my body. I train hard during class and I keep up a routine of kickboxing over the weekend, but to no avail. I am the heaviest I have been in two years. Every time I get a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a car window or in the mirror, I think, oh no, what happened?

Drastic actions must be taken. I must eliminate fast food from my diet and vow to flee from the sight of chow mein bowls topped with delicious, tangy, juicy, orange chicken. I must yield to the blandness of salad and the repetition of roma tomato sandwiches with pesto sauce smeared on it instead of ranch.

I will lose this weight I’ve gained and then some. My shrink says that I should not feel guilty when I eat food, but I do. The sight of it sends me into delighted conniptions. After that, however, comes the moment when I realize I just lost some of my daily allotted calories.

I am eating two cut up roma tomatoes with a half inch cube of chevre smeared on top of the tomato to add some flavor. I dribbled some olive oil on it (not even half a tablespoon), and ground some black pepper all over in the hopes that I could somehow trick my body into thinking I was eating a double-decker hamburger with extra cheese and layers of chipotle sauce.  

Earlier today I had (surprise) a roma tomato sandwich with pesto sauce and cubes of fresh avocado. I love it, but I was fantasizing about a handsome, charming man or a pretty, charming woman, holding a tray of pizza slices drenched in full-fat ranch. Delicious, greasy, chewy, cheesy pizza—gulp.

Grad school is going well. I have nothing terribly important to say about the experience or the stress. It is stressful, but what is more stressful is that ominous black screen on my bathroom scale, staring at me from the corner of the room, haunting me and really pissing me off.

Yum. I think this might be my fourth tomato of the day. If only water came in fat-free, sugar-free chipotle, burger flavor. :)

Gaining Again

I gained 8 pounds in the last three weeks. From 155 to 163. That puts me back in the obese category. I feel like a failure. I succeed in school but fail in my personal life....or else it is the other way around.

My boyfriend is an amazing cook. He cooks delicious, aromatic food and then serves me as much as he eats. He then offers me seconds...dessert...full sugar soda. I am having difficulty saying no. I see it and know it is too much. I tell him I can't finish but he insists. I have this obsession with really tasty food. If it is veggies or even Panda Express I can control myself. I just stop when I am full and throw the rest away. But with home-made, spicy food I fall into this vortex of consumption. I love to eat good, home-made food. It makes me feel loved and nurtured. Then, at the end of the night, I see my belly and I am ashamed.

I lost one pound last night, so I'm 162 at the moment, but that is still 25 pounds more than my goal weight. I want to be 135 again. I was under 115 until the age of 22 or 23, when the psychiatrist put me on Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic that is notorious for massive weight gain. At the age of 24-ish or 25, I lost a lot of weight and weighed in at 133. Of course, I was floridly psychotic and malnourished from my once-a-day meal diet and I was quickly institutionalized, but I still want to be that weight again. I don't want to be 115 or below. I just want to be 135. I like having curves, but I must be in the normal BMI range. I must.

It is sad that I am content not seeing my boyfriend for the next two days because I get to go back on a low cal veggie and yogurt diet. I like his company, but I fear his two entree dinners. There must be some middle ground?

Classes are going very well. It was difficult to adjust to the new standards at first. It took a good two months to get accustomed to the daily readings of academic journals, but it was worth it. I studied hard, I read a lot, and now I have excellent grades. Term papers are coming up, and then that is the end of my first semester as a graduate student. I just have to work my butt off coming up with a good analysis of the data I accumulated.

I am feeling better about being a person who has bipolar-disorder with psychotic manias. I am beginning to see that there is a life outside of drama and madness. There is a life of productivity, moderate amounts of energy, and success. Now, if only I could lose the 25 pounds....

On Weight Loss, Breasts, and Curvy Women

I was watching a youtube video yesterday by a woman who lost a lot of weight and is now very, very slim. She talked to her audience about the shrinking breast size that comes with weight loss. She went from a D cup to an A cup! She then told her audience, "I'm better this way, because I am healthier. Men aren't worth being fat."  Ouch, I thought. I do not want to be fat anymore, but neither do I want to be an A cup. Am I doomed to being one or the other?

I am 162, sometimes down to 159 pounds, but I am only 5'2" so this means I am borderline clinically obese, or very overweight. My breasts fit best in a bra that is a UK size 34FF in Panache bras, and 34G in other bras. Most of my weight winds up in my thighs, followed second by my butt, followed third by my gut. I wish there was a way to spot check these areas and avoid losing weight in my breasts, but this is not possible. When I was 15-21 years old I was about 112 pounds, 115 pounds at my heaviest, but my breasts were a small B cup. I always wanted big breasts. I envied women with pendulous breasts and curvy silhouettes.

Then I got what I wanted but with a steep price. At age 23 I had a major psychotic episode and I was hospitalized. The doctor prescribed me Zyprexa, an atypical antipsychotic with notorious weight gain side effects. It was designed to eliminate psychotic symptoms but it caused massive, immediate weight gain for as long as one takes it. Naturally, I got very fat. I reached 184-190 pounds, which is actually lucky for somebody on anti-psychotics, as many of these new drugs can cause people to become super obese.

My boobs got obese as well. They swelled with the rest of me; from a tiny B cup to a DD cup to a size that I could not find in my local stores. Either the cup didn't fit or the band was so wide in circumference that it would not stay in place, but rather hung around my hips like a hula hoop. Manufacturers assume that people with a medium band have medium breasts and people with larger breasts have a very wide torso. I would make due with a 36DD until that became too small in the cups. I started shopping online to get bigger sizes. I fit the cups of a 38DDD but the band was too big and I wound up getting too many back aches.

I have been regularly exercising since April of last year. I have begun to count my calories and restrict them to 1200-1400 calories daily (I use "Calorie Counter" made by fitness pal, a calorie counting app for android phones). By using a stationary bike, a rowing machine, free weights, taking a judo class, a dance class, and doing aerobics at home, I have lost about 25 pounds from a year ago when I weighed 184. Now around 161 pounds, my boobs lost about 2 inches, but they are still on the large side.

I am still in the process of losing weight. I will stop when I get back to 131 pounds. I lost a lot of weight two years ago, dropping from around 180 to 130 pounds in a matter of months, but I did this through unhealthy means (i.e. crash dieting) and I gained all the weight back and probably damaged my metabolic system during the time when I was crash dieting. I will not crash diet again and if you are crash dieting, please stop! There are healthy ways to lose weight, they just take a little longer to get to your goal.

Anyways, I really hope I am still top heavy when I get to my ideal weight. I have become very fond of being buxom. No, it is not just because that is what men like. I want to look like a woman I could be attracted to (I am a closet bisexual), and my dream woman looks more like Marilyn Monroe than Paris Hilton.

One time, funny story, I was walking to a grocery store and I caught sight of a woman with an amazing, hour-glass figure. Her thick hips swayed as she walked and her waist was surprisingly narrow. I was so taken by her physical appearance that I was walking with my head turned to look at her as she passed. Then suddenly--BANG! I walked right into a pole. I got a little bruise on my cheek from slamming into the pole. I will always remember that woman and her amazing curves, she is my ideal in terms of physical appearance. As for personality, I love, love, love this girl who used to be in my British literature class. She was a fellow linguistics major, studied Japanese, and was so brilliant that she aced all her tests in all her classes.

Sorry, I keep going off on tangents, but I am not editing this at all. Right now I am just typing into the blog without a thought as to flow or coherence. Well, if William Burroughs can do it, so can I! :)
Thanks for reading!

Weight Woes

This April I was 181 pounds---and this was after I'd gone on a vegetarian diet to eliminate all the greasy, saturated meats in my diet. I was probably closer to 190 or 195 at my highest weight. At 5'1 or 5'2, this is not morbidly obese, but it is obese. In case you don't know, there's underweight, normal weight, overweight, obese, and morbidly obese. I knew something had to be done. I was having respiratory problems which made me short of breath while stationary. Walking I was fine but while sitting down I felt I couldn't breathe. This might have been my anxiety condition or it my weight problem, either way, I decided I would deal with the weight.

By July I was 171 pounds. No crash dieting (though I flirted with the idea at my lowest point), just large amounts of vegetables sauteed in olive oil and hot spices, no meat, and a cut back on sugar, pasta, and breads.

At my lowest weight I was 158 this November, down another 13 pounds. I managed this by purchasing a rowing machine with various levels of resistance with my financial aid money and using it as long as I could as often as I could....usually only 20 minutes 4 times a week...plus judo class for 50 minutes 2 times a week since the end of August.

I eat 3 meals a day, no skipping. It was simply that my portion size shrunk while the food I ate became healthier. I have my bad days, but usually I  have a routine where I prepare my vegetables in cumin, coriander, cayenne pepper, and turmeric spices with a regularity that is relaxing for me. As indulgence I will sprinkle some shredded cheese over a cup of vegetables and let it slowly melt into delicious cheesiness. Maybe I'll have a piece of Mexican sweet bread (pan dulce) as a late-night dessert, but for the most part I avoided desserts like some people avoid black widow spiders.

I have to make sure I eat 3 meals a day because I had a period where I did not eat 3 meals a day, I was on a starvation diet and I ate no breakfasts, a salad for lunch, and a measly dinner, drank my weight in sugary soda and sugary coffee to keep me alert at work, and then passed out at night, malnourished and steadily going insane. I lost almost all the weight I'd gained being on medications for schizophrenia, but in my stupid zeal I quit taking the medications and stopped eating the bare minimum requirement for health. When I was inevitably hospitalized for psychosis by my exhausted mother (this time it was secret assassins on television's Sesame Street threatening to kill my entire family), I was 131 pounds, not anywhere near the 112 pounds I was at age 21, but still, I was so damn close! Was it worth it? Hell no! I spent days in the psychiatric facility debating whether I should be thin and psychotic, locked up in psych wards with nobody around to admire my weight loss, or fat and sane, possibly even productive. Hence, why I now have to lose weight!

On the plus side, it was wonderful to give myself permission to eat and enjoy food, despite becoming obese in the process. Where once I had envied my boss's young wife for being rail thin (she worked all day as a waitress in her husband's restaurant and the only thing I ever saw her eat was a salad with cottage cheese on top---a bizarre concoction that I never could get the hang of), I now envy women who are successful in their jobs and happy about their contributions to society. This is an achievement I'm proud of, and though I have to continue to work my way into the normal weight range, I'm on medication, attending University with one semester left until I graduate with my B.A., managing my mental illness, living a life with friends and family, and being productive to society. I never could have accomplished this being unmedicated or starving.

I have a long way to go before I reach my ideal weight---these holidays set me back 5 pounds, back to 164, but I'm determined to accomplish my New Year's goals  of losing weight, exercising 5 times a week, graduating with a decent cumulative GPA in May, budgeting my grant money so I don't wind up penniless by summer time, and raising my self-confidence in my body and my mind. :)

Hopefully, with some patience and ambition, I can accomplish these goals this year.
2011 was a year of painful loss (my cousin by suicide and my grandfather by heart attack), one of scholastic achievement (Dean's List Spring semester), one of unemployment, but a year that I'll be proud of one day in the future as a period of transition from mental patient/pot head to University student.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

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!

"Gaining", a book on life after eating disorders

http://www.amazon.com/Gaining-Truth-About-Eating-Disorders/dp/B002IT5OXO/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

This book is available on amazon dot com. Written by a Aimee Liu, a former model who wrote one of the first memoirs about living with anorexia in the 60's and 70's, this new book focuses on her life afterwards; the triumphs, the relapses, and all the steps in between. She catches up with her old friends from high school, the same clique from her first book, "Solitaire", and writes about their lifestyles and eating habits.

This memoir surprised me in that there is quite a bit of scientific research in her book on statistics and the typical profile of anorectics/bulimics. She goes to a University and discusses the personality types with a pioneer in the field of eating disorders. It was very interesting to read the characteristics that are commonplace among those with an eating disorder.

What I didn't like was the hidden message anorectics give off: if you're overweight, you have more issues than I do, and you should do something about it. A reviewer on amazon dot com mentioned the same thing, that there is an undercurrent of disdain for normal sized and plump women. Compare this with books on  binge eating disorders, where you do not typically find comments that imply slender women are freakish or socially brainwashed. I think this may have to do with the profile type that the author describes at length: a perfectionist and critical person who needs to feel she stands out in a crowd. The question begs: what is perfect and who are you to make that call?

My best friend was anorexic the entire time I knew her and she was that way: highly critical of ME (for the record, I weighed 113-115 pounds and was a size 5 mostly, back then anyways). I was there to support her through her hospitalization after a car accident where it was revealed that she ate even less than I had assumed (and I already assumed she was an anorexic who refused to state it). It was painful to watch her try to pawn off her meal to me in the hospital, or when she spat out "I don't want to get FAT [like you]," to a gentle, overweight nurse who had the unfortunate role of caretaker.

Having read lots of memoirs what strikes me is the amount of hatred anorectics have for overweight people and in particular, nurses at hospitals, whose task it is to make sure their electrolytes are within range, and their heart rate remains normal. Yes, some nurses tend to be overweight, but this is not some conspiracy where fat people love to change the power dynamics in modern society (thin women rule, fat women serve or get out of sight): this is due to the fact that a lot of women who have the capability of care-taking a total stranger have an exaggerated selfless personality (perhaps not healthy). This means they care about strangers more than they care about their own well-being. Also, a lot of nurses had to play the care-taker role at home, and often times their childhood homes were turbulent. Turbulent childhoods often play a major role in over-eating, bulimia, and other disordered eating habits.

Anyways, I had to write that because the campus library has a limited amount of books on BED (binge eating disorders) and yo-yo dieters and a ton of memoirs by anorectics, so if I want to read a book on the plight of women and food, I have to read another anorectic's memoir. I don't mind, I just sometimes need to step back, out of this woman's mentality, and re-evaluate myself and society, so I don't find myself mimicking another disordered eating person.

After note: don't let my influential personality type stop you from discussing your issues. If you're suffering from anorexia, bulimia, or BED, please talk about it, as part of the illness revolves around a secret obsession with food and/or starvation. Secrecy breeds stigma, which is bad for everyone. I just wrote that above paragraph because I spent a lot of time around anorexics, one was my best friend for about 5 years, and the other was my boss, or rather, the wife of my boss who herself was a boss. I spent 3 years watching her pick at a salad every shift, and I eventually started doing the same due to my desire to fit in and what not. Then the salad became my sole meal, then I lost a lot of weight, went mad, got asylumed, and wound up gaining all that lost weight within 6 months of my release. My point: I'm easily influenced by the behavior of others, not their fault, it's mine. So if you have this illness, speak up!

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.