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36point36-blog · 7 years

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Six Things About Losing Weight That Nobody Ever Talks About, Man.

1.) Trying to look exactly like your most beloved celebrity and being inspired/motivated by your most beloved celebrity’s appearance are two very different things. Don’t think you’ve failed because you’ve worked really hard for a long-ass time and still don’t look anything like Beyonce. Who knows what the average woman could accomplish were her full-time job to come with a round-the-clock personal staff (including a nutritionist, chef, and personal trainer), a grueling rehearsal schedule, an unlimited grocery budget, an explicit and pretty much never-ending direct financial incentive to stay in top physical shape, and access (if desired) to the best of the best, most subtle-knived surgeons in the country? I know I may never achieve Beyonce’s silhouette, but my broke ass lost a lot of weight and gained a lot of muscle without any of those things, just adoringly working out to her music videos. If I had her millions, I could have gotten myself an elliptical machine…or a rainbow of good sports bras, ones that weren’t reenforced with old hair ties…or a lifetime supply of my precious chocolate stevia extract. But y'know, as a minimum wage employee, I think I did all right for myself. 2.) Once you leave the “overweight” range and enter into the “normal,” the frequency of appreciative car honks from creepers will increase exponentially, seemingly overnight. This is a reflection of something deeply unhealthy and problematic in our culture, to be sure, but don’t you DARE feel the least bit ashamed if you are secretly delighted and encouraged by getting honked at more often. Own it, girl. Go ‘head. Make all those creepers’ days. Just don’t talk to them or give them your number. They are still creepers. 3.) Food products that are marketed to promote weight loss are fucking snake oil. If “skinny,” “light,” “zero,” “free,” or “fit” has been incorporated into the product name, it is probably hiding a bunch of terrible ingredient secrets in relatively plain sight. If your whole day will be calorically spent if you eat the whole package of something, it’s not a weight loss food. When you look at the nutrition facts on anything in the grocery store, just hypothetically plan for the worst. Try presupposing that you will get super hungry, temporarily lose all self control, and eat the whole box/jar/bag. If you mathematically cannot foresee being able to make up for those calories throughout the day, either naturally or in exercise, that food is not a good weight loss food. I found out by trial and error that heavily seasoned (especially hot and spicy) vegetables, even with a little oil or cheese, can be eaten by the boatload. You’d be surprised how UNhealthy you can make healthy food taste if you get the right flavors in the mix. Same goes for plain nonfat Greek yogurt doctored with frozen fruit and chocolate stevia. This is why I’m adamantly, zealously anti-portion control. You can eat like a full-grown male warthog all day long if you eat certain things instead of others, and by “certain things” I do not mean ice cubes or carrot sticks. I mean, like, actually filling shit. Shit that has lots of colors and textures and tastes good and has actual sauce or tastes like actual chocolate. 4.) Losing weight may not make you more flexible in a way that translates to a better sex life, or cure you of your sexual inhibitions, or turn you into a saucy hellcat in the sack. But if nothing else, in just, like, a literal, straightforward sense, it damn sure makes the physical act of intercourse easier. Like… there’s really just more space available to move your hips and/or limbs around in a manner that is conducive to engaging in coital activity. Sorry to be so clinical about it, but them’s the brakes (breaks?). 5.) If you have been overweight or obese your whole life and one day find yourself at the point in your weight loss where you are considered a “normal” weight (which is, by current national standards, significant “skinnier” than “average”), you will find that your “life as a fat woman conversation” card has been revoked. Indefinitely, no exceptions, no questions asked. This rule may bend a little with VERY close friends or VERY close relatives, but you can no longer - I repeat, NO LONGER - just casually be shooting the shit with a bunch of plus-size acquaintances one day and start talking about the experience of being fat. It doesn’t matter if you were, yourself, fat for a quarter of a century. If you are no longer fat, you cannot talk about being fat. You can kind of get away with talking about losing weight (and even then, only to a certain extent), but DON’T TALK ABOUT ACTUALLY BEING FAT. It may feel surreal to have lost that right - or even, lonely…or like, unfair, somehow? - but that’s just how it is. Your struggle is no longer their struggle, and whether or not it makes a whole lot of sense to you, you just kind of need to shut up about it. 6.) You will find that, in this particular day and age, after a lifetime of weight issues and/or obesity and not being able to find clothes that were BIG enough, you may now find it hard to find clothes that are SMALL enough. At 140 pounds, I am much closer to the bigger end (154) of the normal weight scale than I am to the smaller end (118), but because of the increased national obesity rate and directly correlated but significantly higher increase in “vanity sizing” over the past decade, I legitimately struggle to find clothes in stores that are SMALL enough for me to wear without worrying about an overabundant swath of fabric slipping and exposing an areola or granny-pantied ass cheek. Some stores are worse than others. I’m 5'6 and have a 28 inch waist, yet somehow wear a ZERO at Old Navy. You’d think this would be pleasant or flattering, but it’s really just unsettling. American clothing manufacturers used to want to shut women who were over size 12 out of the market - but now that there are so many more of them, they’re simply trying to placate the masses and convince shoppers that they’re smaller than they are. I have a dear friend who, simply because of her rare (and widely-envied) genetic makeup, is 5'9 and 105 pounds. She’s way too tall (and old) to wear kid’s clothes, yet way too slim to wear clothes from the vast majority of the popular women’s clothing stores available to her. This wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem ten or fifteen years ago. At 105 pounds, SHE should be the size zero…sure as hell not me. Vanity sizing genuinely makes me furious. I will leave it there for now, but I could rant about this particular topic all the livelong day. ‘Kay…byyyye.

#fitness #weight loss #weightloss #obese #diet #health food #nutrition

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36point36-blog · 7 years

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Here's My Story. It's Long, and I Swear a Lot.

Prior to my current job, I worked for my family business - a small grocery store - more or less steadily for fourteen years, from the age of 16 to the age of 30. The store was located five or so miles from the state capitol, in the heart of a college town, flanked on one side by a sprawling campus and on the other by a large, twisting expanse of highways. Those highways connected us to a vast network of far-flung, sleepy little towns and hamlets that most of us had never seen. Our customer base was therefore very diverse - foreign students, frat boys, truckers, church ladies, families, foodies, and everyone in between were amongst our regulars. There were literally dozens of customers that I saw every single day, five days a week, for over a decade. I naturally became close with many of them, as did much of the staff - who were themselves all very close with one another. We were not always friends, but we nonetheless came to know each other uncommonly well. We knew each other’s families, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, pets, personal habits, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. Many of us became co-workers as teenagers and continued seeing each other every day well into twenties whether we wanted to or not, which meant that we saw each other’s physical appearances change incrementally over time, in every imaginable direction. Our hair was cut, dyed, grown out, cut, and dyed again. A few of the “boys” that were hired as teenagers started going bald in their twenties. Some of our clothes changed subtly with the fashions of the day, became aggressively collegiate during football season, got frumpier during pregnancy, got sloppier during hangovers or bouts of depression. Waistlines expanded and contracted and expanded again for all sorts of reasons. All of these aesthetic changes just sort of took on a natural ebb and flow amongst the core of employees who’d been there the longest. When you see someone every day for ten years, they eventually transcend whatever they happen to wear or weigh at any given time. Whether they’re fat, thin, bald, pregnant, sixteen, or twenty-six, they are simply themselves at that point. Whatever state they’re in becomes, at that point, a natural one - simply because you’ve seen them in so many states.

But in 2014, my family business closed. It was squeezed out rather controversially by developers and replaced by a national chain store. The aforementioned core of still-young veteran employees was heartbreakingly disbanded. We had become adults together elbow to elbow. We knew each other’s favorite movies and bands and donut flavors. We had survived terrible fights, made out drunkenly in dark bedrooms at parties, cried together, laughed together, exchanged birthday presents, braided each other’s hair, covered each other’s shifts. And then it was all over, and with grim faces and leaden hearts we begrudgingly became other people’s co-workers, other people’s checkout girls, other people’s customer service representatives.

Which brings me back to the heart of this essay or whatever it is - the paradox of former obesity. When the store closed and I had to get another job, I was 220 pounds. I did not actually KNOW that because I had, for my entire adult life, asked the staff at my doctor’s office not to tell me the actual number whenever they weighed me. I would step backwards onto the scale and shut my eyes, and they kept it a secret as per my request. But I was nonetheless 220 pounds. When I started at my current job, roughly two dozen strangers became my co-workers and met me for the first time as a 220-pound woman. That was in September of 2014.

A little over a year later, in October of 2015, I was on top of a ladder at work, missed a step, and accidentally head-butted the side of the light fixture. Now, I am just about the most panic-stricken, white-knuckled hypochondriac and/or pessimist you could possibly imagine. Every minor ailment spells imminent doom to me. If I have a slight cough for more than two days, I become increasingly certain that I’m a modern-day “Satine,” dying from consumption in my own non-musical but equally tragic version of “Moulin Rouge.” In my warped, worst-case-scenario mind, a UTI becomes a long-dormant strain of neurosyphilis, for which I am the Patient Zero. A skin rash all but whispers aloud to me, “Get your affairs in order - you’re not long for this world.” So I hit my head at work, and I naturally freaked the fuck out. That “Concussion” movie had either just come out or was about to come out, and I also happened to have a friend who was undergoing brain surgery at the time, so general head injuries were already on my mind to an unusual extent at the time. The next day, I had a crippling headache - maybe from hitting my head, maybe from freaking out for 24 straight hours about hitting my head. Either way, I was encouraged by my manager to fill out worker’s comp paperwork and go to the nearest urgent care, an unfamiliar setting that only exacerbated my cold-sweated, shaky-handed anxiety. When they finally called me back and said they had to weigh me, I was in such a frenzied state of mind that I forgot my own iron clad rules. Without thinking, I stepped onto the scale the NORMAL way - with both eyes wide the fuck open, looking directly into what might as well have been the fucking eye of Sauron - the scale’s small, menacing LED screen. This would eventually reveal itself to be one of those ultra-rare, movie-like moments where life as you know it - your regular-ass, everyday life - is literally and profoundly changed forever. At the age of 30, after a lifetime of being either obese or significantly overweight, I learned for the first time that I weighed over 200 pounds.

There are no words to really describe the effect that this revelation had on me. It was like…oh, I don’t know…being struck by lightning and beaten with a cattle prod while learning that my new husband had just been murdered. During the nine month period leading up to this cataclysmic event, I’d actually been LOSING weight in preparation for my September wedding. I’d had several appointments with my regular doctor, who only told me how much I LOST - not how much I WEIGHED. She was increasingly encouraged by the small but steady progress I was making, and amazingly, despite my natural pessimism, so was I. In fact, I was pretty damn confident on my wedding day. I genuinely thought I looked better than I had in years - quite possibly my whole adult life, even. I had, after all, lost nine whole pounds since getting engaged the previous December. I didn’t see a fat bride in the mirror. I actually saw a somewhat transformed person. Nine pounds! Nine of ‘em! That damn near constituted a full-blown makeover, as far as I was concerned.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was nine pounds less than a staggering 220 - my highest weight on record, which was added to my medical file in December of 2014, right after I got engaged. The urgent care scale read “211,” a number that from that moment onward was permanently tattooed into my brain tissue. Calling it a “wake-up call” would be a hilarious understatement. When I left the urgent care clinic, my heart was pounding out of my chest. I started sobbing the instant I got into my car. I briefly stopped crying long enough to pull up a BMI calculator on my phone, then immediately started crying again once I’d crunched my own numbers. Even nine pounds lighter than before, I was clinically obese. Not even on the cusp between “overweight” and “obese.” There was a little line graph on the BMI calculator website with green on the “normal” side that shaded into yellow once it reached the “overweight” range, then into orange for “extremely overweight,” then finally into the deep oranges and reds of “obesity.” I was well into the orange-red zone, dangerously close to the patch of blood-red at the tail end of the line.

I went home early from work and cried myself to sleep. But the next day, in an unprecedented act of self-improving action-taking, I bought myself a pair of drugstore headphones and I walked to work for the first time. There were approximately 1.5 miles between my front door and the entrance of my workplace, and the first time I walked it in both directions, I felt like I was some sort of 19th century wandering pioneer or ancient nomadic tribeswoman. That first walk TO work might as well have lasted a full calendar year - that’s how epic and sprawling a distance it was at the time, especially out in the open for all to see. Now that I knew I fat I was, I was forced to realize that all the joggers and bikers and drivers and passengers that were passing me ALSO knew how fat I was. This was not only taking place in a fairly small town, but also my lifelong hometown - I had worked, lived, and spent the entirety of my K-12 years within the same five-mile radius. So, presumably, at least some of the people who saw me walking that fateful day recognized me - knew me - had known for years how fat I was. The whole way there, the whole way back, I felt like I was jiggling stark naked down the open sidewalk for all the world to see, with a neon sign affixed to my head that read “CLINICALLY OBESE” in flashing, colorful letters. But somehow, even though it was one of the single most embarrassing and physically uncomfortable experiences of my life, I knew that it had to be done…that it was the only way out of the nightmarish orange-red zone on that BMI chart. I made minimum wage (still do), and I knew I couldn’t even afford an occasional aerobics class, let alone a gym membership or a personal trainer. So I just DIY-ed the fuck out of a radically new lifestyle.

I didn’t count calories or ban refined sugars or carbs or anything, but I started eating a fuck ton of frozen vegetables and spicy sauces from the international foods aisle, and I stopped eating Annie’s macaroni and cheese altogether, which I adored and ate very frequently, always with butter, always two boxes at a time. I copied and pasted all my beloved, rousingly violent 90s rap from my computer into the internal storage on my phone and blared it into my headphones for about an hour and a half total, three or so days a week, on my way to and from work, walking as briskly as I possibly could. I bought some used Gillian Michaels DVDs and played them on mute with the captions on so I could at least listen to my own invigorating, murderous rap jams while I flung myself to and fro across the room and up and down on to the floor with hand weights, as per Gillian’s instructions.

I kid you not, the results. Were. Immediate. Had they NOT been immediate, I might have just screamed “FUUUUUCK IT” into a bowl of peas and given up. But I started losing weight RIGHT away, to an extent that even I (who was, mind you, utterly prepared to fail) could plainly see with my own two eyes. A month in, I was able to squeeze into my favorite coat from six winters before, when I had briefly flirted with the mid 150s, then gotten lost in a long bout of depression, during which I began to drink heavily and rapidly slide into obesity. Two months in, I could actually zip up my junior prom dress. Three months in, I started to occasionally get compliments. By late winter of 2016, during Michigan’s presidential primaries, I was comfortable enough with walking long distances that I canvassed with a genuine spring in my step for the Bernie Sanders campaign. I continued to lose weight during this period and through the end of the winter, so when Bernie won the primary, it felt as though I had, miraculously, won twice.

Looking back, I’m 100% certain that once my weight loss got to the point where it was visible to even the least attentive observer, the overwhelming majority of my co-workers and casual acquaintances didn’t expect me to continue with it much further. I had been 220 pounds and was now around 170. I had to get all new clothes, and I carried myself differently. I had already defied the odds in terms of the national statistics. Once customers started commenting on my weight left and right, within earshot of everyone I worked with, it would have been fair to assume I would have just stopped there. But that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. If there was one prevailing lesson I had thoroughly learned at that point, it was that cheesiest of all maxims - basically, “what you think is impossible might actually be possible,” or whatever variation on that you prefer. No one - DO YOU HEAR ME? - NO ONE was less likely than me to succeed. I’m not saying that to be self-deprecating - I’m simply stating a fact. I had never liked - or even tolerated - sports or exercise. I had never enjoyed being outdoors. I had never possessed an ounce of will power or self-control. I had always, always, ever since I was a baby, eaten like a lumberjack in a cartoon or a rescued prisoner of war. I had been overweight my entire childhood and obese as an adult. I was also over thirty. The deck was fucking stacked against me in a lot of ways, and goddamn it, I pushed the fuck back. I kept going. Eighty pounds later (36.36% total weight lost, hence the title of this blog), I’m still going. I’m a little deaf from all the rap blaring into my headphones, and my ropy, calloused feet resemble a gnarled old ballerina’s, but my BMI went from 35.5 to 22.6. I own (and comfortably wear, without Spanx or other control top undergarments) a size 4 Calvin Klein dress. I walk an average of 13 miles a day. This past Tuesday, three days ago, I walked twenty. Alone and happily, quite unexpectedly, without a set goal or destination.

If you think you can’t do it, you’re just wrong. I may not know you, but I hope to God you give yourself a chance and try. I can help you if you want. That’s for real why I made this blog - I am, in so many ways, still as hot a mess of an adult as I ever was, and I’m a very unlikely mentor for anything at all, but in this ONE specific instance, I am living proof that a bunch of weight can be lost without surgery. Or a class. Or portion control. Or a specific diet. Or a food journal. Or a gym. Or fancy equipment. For real. I did it. I highly recommend it.

What all too many so-called “body positivity” activists and pseudofeminists will tell you is that if you’re obese, you don’t really need to lose weight. You’re fine the way you are. The patriarchy or the establishment or the fashion industry or what the fuck ever are just trying to keep you down, and real women have curves, and beauty is within, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth. Now, it’s true that curves are beautiful. It’s true that you can be healthy and be a little overweight. No one should be fat-shamed (or body-shamed at all) by anyone. Bullying IS wrong. Beauty IS within. Cellulite IS normal. Barbie-like bust-waist-hip ratios ARE unnatural and unrealistic for almost everyone. I am not the enemy. This is not a so-called “thinspo” or “proana” blog. This is an ex-obese blog. This is about being obese and wanting not to be. Having been obese for most of my life, I can assure you, flat the fuck out, the alternative is better. In all candor, it feels better weighing 140 pounds than it does weighing 220 pounds. My doctor assures me, might I add, that it IS better. She can hear it in my breathing and my heartbeat. She can see it in my blood pressure. So I do not pretend to have all the answers. I don’t even consider myself to be a particularly accomplished human being overall. I never finished college, I work in retail, I make minimum wage, and I’m 33 years old. But one of the crowning achievements thus far of my entire life has been losing eighty pounds of myself, that magical thirty-six-point-thirty-six percent, and I make no apologies for my pride. If you want to do something like that yourself, feel free to ask me anything you want, or tell me your own story.

So. Thank you for your time…and good luck.

#fitspo #fitness #health & fitness #weightloss #weight loss #obese #nutrition #makeover #diet #workout

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