Thin Fantasy vs. Reality

March 30, 2013

40.5 pounds to go

I’ve been avoiding writing this blog for about a month now.   When I first started dieting and even before, I would say to myself “I would give anything to be 60 pounds lighter.”  Not my goal, not skinny, but just more comfortable.  It’s another one of those weird self-negotiations.  “God / Universe / Powers that be please don’t help me lose 100 pounds but I’d give anything to get halfway.”

I’m guilty of having a number in my head that is the trigger for this in-between self-negotiation.   I’ve thought about this number since the beginning:  this is when I would begin to look and feel normal.  When I would no longer be fat.  I wouldn’t be skinny either, just fit-in-with-everyone-else weight.  And it’s only .5 pounds away.  I saw it for a brief glimpse last weekend but I think it frightened me so I wasn’t so great with my food this week.  Not terrible, just not that great.  I don’t think I was quite ready to become friends yet.

In short, my thin fantasy isn’t really a ‘thin’ fantasy, it is a ‘normal’ fantasy.

So what happens when you begin to fantasize about weight loss?  The same delusions for other fantasies still apply.  But I find these are the top 5 things I think will magically happen when I become thin:

1) I will become popular.

2) People will see me for I really am, not the fat.

3) All my problems will go away.

4) People wont judge me negatively for my appearance.

5) I’ll get my way all the time / people will be nicer to me.

The thing is, these notions weren’t kicking in for when I get to the ultimate goal number, they were kicking in with the ‘now’ number.  And where am I now?  I threw out 4 bags of clothes a few weeks ago because they were hopelessly baggy on me.   I’m comfortably in a size 10.  I’m trying not to buy too many clothes because they only fit me well for about a month.  My gut has gone away and turned into a belly.   I get at least one person a day noticing that I’ve lost weight.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “you just keep shrinking, soon there won’t be anything left!”

I see myself as still on a path, but others seem to see me at the finish line.  When I look in the mirror I feel good, and almost revel in disbelief that I’ve made it this far.  I put on shirts and remember when I couldn’t even button them up and now they’re too big on me.  I’ve had to buy new bras because the band size has shrunk from a 38 to 34.  Many of my rings are now too big on me.  My pantyhose are too big on me, which I didn’t even think was possible.  When I do go shopping I find myself reaching for the size 12’s, 14’s and XL’s still because there’s no way I’m going to fit into anything else.   And then they’re too big!  When I went to try on wedding dresses back in January I was wearing a skirt, suit jacket and pantyhose and when she put me in the first dress she was like “holy shit, you are hiding some curves under there.”   And I think to myself, ‘I was hiding? Really? I didn’t even realize.”

So, I’ve been fantasizing about getting to this weight and how normal I would feel and gain “fit-in-ness” but everyone’s noticing, and I’m not necessarily blending in, I’m standing out.  Even though I still often subconsciously wear clothes that are too big so I wont.

It’s almost as if I play down the attention because I don’t want to get thrown off track.  The more I think about what others think of me, the more I go running to the fridge for more string cheese.  Calm my nerves oh sweet nutella!

It goes back to, thank god I’m doing this slowly because it gives me time to get used to all the change.

Getting back to the standard fantasies that come along with weight loss, when I think back to the beginning of this journey and my goal weight the biggest thought that stood out was all the fat bias would go away.  People wouldn’t refer to me as overweight / obese, they wouldn’t associate my capabilities with my weight,  (i.e. I must be lazy because I was fat) and things would just be a little bit easier for me.  The good old “skinny people don’t have any problems” line stuck in my head.  Which of course, is total bullshit.  There are all sorts of biases associated with skinny people (bitches) which are also totally untrue.  And they have problems just like everyone else.  They’re just doing it in a different package.

Even at my stage now, only a half a pound away from my ‘normal’ fantasy my job and workload hasn’t gotten any easier with my weight loss.  The way people treat me hasn’t really changed.  That’s one bucket.  In the other bucket is the compliments and the noticing.  They’re mutually exclusive which is also a hard concept to grasp.  I think I wasn’t ready to cope with meeting the reality of what the number I’ve thought about for so long.  So instead I went cake tasting and ate a lot of salad with too much dressing on it this week.  It’s why I was avoiding this blog because I’m not quite sure how to interpret my new reality.  Am I thin?  Am I normal?  Am I ready to embark on the next leg of this journey?  It’s like getting on the scale after a food fest.  It’s really scary and I don’t want to look at the number, but then when it shows up it’s not so bad.  I know what I’m dealing with and stop worrying about the ‘what if’s.’  Facing it is, by far, the hardest part.

As humans, I think we're still programmed to fantasize about 'how things might be."  Now that I'm ready to get over this hump I'm sure these fantasies will make a comeback, just with a new number in mind.  I know deep down the reality will probably be different and that's ok.  I've been thinking for the last month that I wasn't thin enough to write this blog with courage and reality, but it turns out I am.  And even if I'm not, goddamnit I wrote this anyway.  It's done.  I've faced it.  I'm ready to keep going.

The Dreaded Plateau

March 15, 2013

40.5 Pound to go

There is nothing like working hard all week with calorie counting and exercise then getting on the scale on Saturday morning to sing the “what the fuck?!>@*^%#$” song.   It doesn’t move.  Or the needle goes up.  What’s even worse is when 2 weeks go by with no movement.  Then if a third week or more passes by true frustration sets in.

When it’s only one week of no-scale-budging standard rationalizations get me through the morning.  I know I wasn’t as good this week or my period is coming and I forgot (again).   Every month I have at least one week of no movement with the scale because of the dreaded period bloat.  But at least I know (most of the time) it’s coming so it doesn’t make me too upset.  Although some days I still grumble and kick the cat.  It can’t be helped.  Mike can tell by the look on my face if it was a good scale day.

Like I said, it’s when those 2 or more weeks go by when I start to wonder what’s wrong.  I find the number-one-favorite-all-time excuse people use when they’re not losing is “oh, don’t worry, you probably just converted fat to muscle so you are still losing you just can’t tell.”  The thing is, after scouring the internet and trying to do some research with fitness gurus, how much work does it actually take to convert a pound of fat into a pound of muscle?  How long does it take?  The stark truth is that nobody seems to know the conversion.  They’re good at platitudes like:

“Oh, don’t worry just keep going, it will come off!” 

“You’re toning what you have.”

“You have to lose the fat before you see the muscle.”

Umm, thanks for the encouragement but none of these answers give me facts that I can work with and half of them don’t even answer the question I asked.  I want a straight answer like strength training twice a week for a half an hour will build a pound of muscle?  Or is it three times a week?  Cardio exercise in general four times a week?  How about major hiking on the weekend?  Still, no clue.

From my own experience, this is what I’ve found with the great fat to muscle ratio question:

1)          1) Extreme exercise: I’ve noticed when I go to the extreme with exercise where I hit under my net calorie goal by 300 calories or more every day for a week [Math: 1600 calories of food minus 500 calories exercise equals 1100 net calories for the day and 300 under goal] or more I don’t lose weight.  This also means for the week I’m somewhere between 1500-2000 under my net weekly goal. [9800 net weekly calorie goal].  My guess is I’m either building muscle or kicking my body into starvation mode.

2)       2)  Strength Training: I did do the P90X program going on 2 years ago now.  I did it faithfully, every day only taking 1 day off a week to rest.  I think I made it around the 70 day mark before I gave up.  My best guestimate is I put on 10-15 pounds of muscle with this program.

The other excuse I use a lot that I actually believe is true is a body recalibration.  There are many scientific math things happening with the chemistry of my body that I can’t even begin to understand, but I do know that naturally it wants to preserve fat “for later.”  The just-in-case survival situation so you won’t die if you can’t get to food.  I believe (again, I don’t have any facts to back this up, just feedback I’ve gathered over the years) if you begin to lose weight rapidly your body goes “whoa! Hang on a minute.  Not so fast!  This could be an emergency.  Put on the breaks.  No more fat leaves this body without level 7 security clearance.”

Technically, I think this is what they call starvation mode.

My proof to back up this claim is the weight where my body tends to plateau.  It happens suspiciously at weights I’ve spent a great deal of time at in the past.  In August when I hit my first plateau for almost a month but it was also the same weight I had been it for the previous 2-3 years.  My body was used to it.  In the past I’ve always plateau’ed at what will be the 26 pounds to go mark because I spent almost all of high school there and a big part of college.  Chemically, I think it’s the power of the familiar.

So how do you get past the hump?  Answer: change.  (groan.)  If you get into a routine where you eat the same exact thing every week – even if it’s at your goal, your body will adapt.  If you do the identical elliptical machine work out for weeks on end, your body will also adapt.  The change doesn’t have to be a butt-buster extreme workout routine replete with diet pills and 1100-calorie-a-day starvation but something small.  Switch up your vegetables.  Crack down on the MyFitnessPal tracking if you’ve been getting lax with not logging the extra cookies.  Try different proteins.  Cut out one food item you think may make a difference.  (My experiment recently is cutting back on red meat.  In August with the first plateau is when I experimented with cutting out gluten and it worked.)  If you walk every day try walking every other day and mixing it up with weight training.  Throw in sit ups and push ups before you go to bed.  Typically doing one small thing differently is what gets me past the hump.  That and pressing onward even though I’m frustrated.

The biggest thing with the “change” advice is when I say “change up your routine” oftentimes people hear “go exercise like a rabid monkey and stop eating.”  To which I say: never underestimate the power of lowering the bar with your expectations.

Put in another way, have you ever experienced something like this at work?

I've said both at work and gotten more praise when I said they were nuts.

When it comes to weight, I think we expect to act like rabid starving monkeys and lose 5 pounds in a week when in reality it’s almost impossible to do.  You either kick your body into starvation mode and it holds onto the fat or you couldn’t possibly cut enough calories in a week to lose 5 pounds.  However, normal weight loss is 1 pound a week and rapid weight loss is more than 2 pounds a week.  If you go into this journey expecting to lose 2 pounds or more a week consistently; honey your expectations are amiss.  Lower the bar.  It will make you happier.  And give you a goal you can achieve rather than chucking the whole thing.

Once in awhile there’s still a freak weight-gain when you’ve been good or a plateau you can’t explain.  A few weeks ago I got sick and gained 5 pounds but it came right off at the end of the week once the last of the congestion drained.  I had no idea it was possible to gain 5 pounds of boogers.  As I’ve said no less than eight hundred thousand times already keep pressing on my friend.  I know it’s a platitude and I mocked it earlier in this blog, but it’s the only option left.  These past 2 weeks I didn’t lose and finally did this morning.  So, take it from me – I’m living it right now.

What the fuck is normal?

March 3, 2013

42.2 pounds to go

Ever since I started college, I’ve yo-yo’ed with weight.  First put on 40 pounds.  Then lost 50 pounds (low carb).  Then put on about 20 pounds by the time I graduated.  After college I packed on another 55 pounds to the 20.   Then came Optifast in 2004 and I lost 80 pounds.   Then from 2005 – 2012 I regained the 80 pounds.   In 2011 I lost about 25 pounds (P90X) then put it back on plus 15.  I feel like of the 15 years of my adult life I’ve either been in the process of not caring about my weight and letting it creep on or drastically dieting.  I’ve never had any awareness of ‘normal’ and I’ve only seen the ‘healthy range’ twice:  once when I lost the weight in college for about a month and then again in 2004 for about 2 months.  I have no real experience reaching a healthy weight and maintaining it.  It’s always been too hard. 

Since I’ve only had brief glimpses of what it’s like to be ‘skinny,’  I also don’t have any real knowledge of what it feels like, or what to expect.  I have no idea what ‘normal’ is.  Technically, I’ve been overweight just about my entire adult life – that’s what I know and that’s what feels normal to me.  It’s what I’m used to.  Even now, I feel terrific and thin although according to the charts I have at least 32.2 pounds to go.  It’s like my logical brain gets it, but my emotional brain is completely confused.  How can this body I have right now not be considered healthy?  It’s so comfortable!  And I look good!

Even typing this now, I feel the hives of anxiety prickling on my back.  For fuck’s sake, I don’t want to talk about this.  It is so damn uncomfortable – like poking my soft underbelly that doesn’t want to be touched.   I have to admit that I have no idea what it feels like to be ‘physically normal.’

This would explain why I’ve had emotional freak-outs about every 10-15 pounds on my current journey.  The first anxiety attack came on July 18, 2012 at 22 pounds lost.  That weight is where I had been from about 2009 – 2011.   It was my most recent body I had become accustomed to, and I had to say goodbye.   That was the body I had been promoted to manager in, the one where people recognized me as professionally excellent.  The one I started dating my fiancé in.  The one he found sexy.  Where I felt sexy and loved and found – finally.   Then it happened again at 30 pounds lost around August 25^th.    This is the body I was promoted from assistant to account executive.  The one that the competing paper recruited me in.  That I was called the ‘best rep they had ever had in their department.’  The one where I got the call to go back to my old company because they missed me so badly.

And then at 50 pounds lost mark in December I didn’t even believe it.  I got on the scale, and then got off again for about 10 minutes in my bathroom that morning.  I still didn’t believe it.  I had reached the point of original weight gain in college.  This is the body my whole lindy-hopping dance scene which I was obsessed with from 2005-2007 knows me to be before the weight started creeping on again.  Now, here is a form of myself that I haven’t seen in ages.  The shock felt inexplicably like depression.  What the fuck does that mean?

Even now, I’ve lost another 7.8 pounds since the 50 pound mark and I’m in completely new territory.  I never spent very long at this particular weight point – it’s always been a passing through territory – either up or down.  No one really knows me at this size.  Hell, I don’t even know me at this size.  There are wisps of thoughts such as “will people still like me for me in my new form?”  “Will they still recognize my intelligence in the new package?”   The answer, hopefully, is yes – but there are weird behaviors by those around me that are negative that are also hard to cope with.

Like, for example – the winking ratio has gone up recently.  I find that cute, yet also schmoozy.  Point to ring finger.  Totally taken dude.   On the opposite end, there was a guy at work who was always overly-friendly to me and now that I’ve gotten visibly skinner is a total dickbag.   What is your problem?  I was never available to you in the first place, but this behavior is confusing and at the same time exhausting.  I’ve had boyfriends in the past when I’ve lost weight accuse me of getting skinnier so I could get away from them.  That came out of left field and was completely untrue (at least for me) – the only reason I truly want to lose weight is for myself so I feel better – not to hurt or harm anyone around me.  In short, sometimes my weight loss triggers behavior in someone else that has nothing to do with me, yet sometimes it’s hurtful behavior.   It’s hard to deal with, but I’ve been trying to have thicker skin about it this time around since I know it’s coming.

Does this all really just boil down to ‘no one likes change, and just try to do what makes me happy?’  Yet, I’m dealing with both sides of the coin – on one side I don’t like change and on the other I’m losing weight for myself.  Push pull.  Push pull.  It’s like emotional diarrhea.   After all these trips to the bathroom, I’m hoping it will run its course and I’ll feel good at the end of it.  It’s all new, and I guess all forms of me could be considered normal.   I think I just need to strap on my seat belt a little tighter and buckle in tight for the rest of the ride.