Monday, September 21, 2009

Who are you, and what have you done with slightly neurotic Alyson?

Is this success, or failure? I don't even know, to be truthful.

I mentioned that my husband and I had spent hours and hours discussing the current societal view of beauty, the realities of me having borne seven children, and what clothes look good on my current body.

The change in my psyche since that conversation has been, I have to say it, pretty profound. Suddenly I don't care about losing weight. I don't care if I ever do. My desire to be a tight, hard little size 8 or 6 is gone, gone as surely as if it never existed. It's only been a couple of weeks, but I see everyone very differently than I did just two weeks ago. I'm more accepting of personal variations. I think there is a flattering way to dress for every body type, and that if someone looks bad at their weight it is possibly/probably because they're not wearing the right sorts of clothes.

I have some cute clothes now, in the size I currently am. They look pretty good on me, and I look pretty good in them—I guess it's a symbiotic relationship. :) And for the moment I feel free from the pressure I put on myself to chase an ideal that is unreachable (except through plastic surgery and photoshop).

Does that mean I never want to lose another ounce? Nah. But it means I'm going to be happier with myself right where I am. And I'm going to be less focused on weigh-ins. And I'll be contented with small losses or losses that take a long time, rather than feeling like I'll only really be happy if I manage to lose 20 pounds this week. Even though I know that's impossible, I've felt that way before. It's dumb.

I know I could eat less and survive nicely. I know I consume more calories than a 120-pound body needs, or one that weighs 130 or even 140. So some days I'll eat less. I'll try to limit portions, and stop eating when I'm full—listen less to my tastebuds and more to my satisfied stomach. I'll try to limit empty calories, not eat so much sugar. And I'll weigh myself when I feel like it, and not worry about it when I don't. For the time being, I'm not a slave to public opinion. That's a good place to be.

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Now playing: Doves - Kingdom of Rust
via FoxyTunes

Shout-out to Angela

Having a conversation with Angela, who commented on my last post.
First could you explain a bit more when you mean you didn't touch your metabolism? As in you never felt a change etc?

I mean that it functioned the same before, during, and afterward. I didn't cause it damage, I didn't slow it down or speed it up. People are so afraid of "ruining" their metabolisms and entering starvation mode. I don't believe it. I believe they're not experiencing the quick loss they want, so they make up other excuses for it like starvation mode or slow metabolism or I lost three pounds of fat but gained two pounds of muscle.
I also can understand what you are saying about not believing in the whole idea of starvation mode but I can't get behind it 100% as i do agree we are resilient but at the same time we are primal and really not that far removed in the scale of life from our primitive ancestors.

We may have to agree to disagree on this one, because to me it sounds like more excuses. It's been millenia and millenia. If we believe that our bodies are adaptable and have evolved since then, why would we claim they haven't adapted or evolved after all, just because our pattern of losing changes?

Losing weight is undoubtedly a complex process, much less predictable than a table in a spreadsheet, I won't lie. I never have the results I predict or hope for. But I know if I eat less, I lose, even if I can't predict how much. And it has nothing to do with ancient history. It has to do with whether we're getting adequate food. Are we? Almost certainly. There are extreme cases under which people are starved, but I don't think any of us [I guess I speak of people without eating disorders] are in those conditions.
But what makes me think you may be right about starvation is I had gastric bypass almost a year and a half ago. I was 366 and am now 190-184 depending on scale, time of week, etc. I went from losing thirty lbs a month, twenty, lbs etc to just 1-3 a month in the last three months.

Congratulations on your fantastic loss!
though I have severly fallen off the wagon as far as excercise! I am trying to find my mojo again and really is there mojo?

There certainly is inspiration, motivation, and dedication.

On Brad Pilon's blog I just watched a video entry that applies here. He talks about the skewed message we're getting these days—that we need to increase our exercise to match our consumption. That's pretty backward. We should reduce our consumption to the level we need, rather than trying to meet some activity quota that brings our consumption into balance. Why?
  1. We can never out-exercise our consumption. We are capable of consuming hundreds or even thousands of calories in minutes. (When I was a teen I could eat a half a pizza, probably 2000 calories, in 10 minutes or so. How long does a burger and fries take? Or a heaping helping of cake and ice cream?) Exercising at maximum intensity, we burn maybe 6 calories per minute. You can see how out of whack that is, when it takes less than 60 seconds to eat a 280-calorie candy bar. It would take hours and hours of exercise to balance a single too-big meal.

  2. There does exist, for every person, an amount of food that can be consumed daily that will reduce us to or maintain us at our optimal body fat level, without exercise. If eating food is the problem, then eating food should be the solution. We don't weigh more than we'd like because we exercise too little, we weigh more because we eat too much.

  3. There does exist, for every person, a minimal amount of exercise that gives them the muscle appearance and mass they want. Doing more exercise beyond this minimal amount doesn't necessarily increase the amount of muscle mass, and may possibly just be a waste of time. And once that mass is established, those developed muscles won't be visible if they're still covered with fat from eating too much. (My own example of this: I have abs of steel. I can mantain my strong abdominals with just a few ab exercises every week; exercising hours and hours more doesn't make them any stronger, I'd need steroids to do anything more than I've done with them. But no one can see them, because they're buried under at least ten pounds of abdominal fat. No one would know, by looking at my body, what a strong belly I have.)

Anyway all those times my body was starved and I kept loosing I did have one plateau though and I had to increase my protein so maybe that was due to starvation mode??

I have no idea. I know when I'm eating reduced calories, a caloric number smaller than the amount I need to sustain my current weight, if I hit a plateau it breaks much faster when I eat more for a week than when I eat less for a week. I think we just need to change things up, give the body something new to process, freak it out a little. Because it isn't a simple equation, or a machine that gives us predictable results.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

*shrug*

Not sure why weight loss has slowed down to the speed of naught, but I'll keep on keepin' on. Have started exercising during lunchtime since I'm not eating anyway, and that is going marvelously well. Can't believe how great it feels, actually, so I'll stick with it while it works. And hopefully the weight will at least trickle off.

Husband and I went out to dinner last Saturday evening, to my favorite restaurant. I ate exactly what I wanted to, but I was moderate with the portions. Win! We had a long, long, hours long conversation about bodies—about the pressure I feel to have a certain body because that is all that is portrayed in the media. I'd really love to have a tight, flat little tummy. Will that happen, after bearing seven? I just don't foresee it. I could possibly lose that much weight, but at what sacrifice?

And why should I feel like I must? Why do I crave it so badly?

Interestingly, we ended up thinking I needed to go looking at new clothes, some that don't fit me quite so snugly. Some of my shirts, while they look okay when I'm standing, accentuate my rolls on my abdomen most unflatteringly when I sit. What if they were a little looser, and could drape over and camouflage the rolls? We went to Eddie Bauer and tried on a few shirts and pants in a bit larger size and found some things that actually look quite nice.

So I'm feeling, actually, okay[er] about myself. Why do I need to get down to a certain weight to be cute, to dress well, to feel happy about myself?

I'll continue. I'm doing well. But I'm also okay, right now, with me. I'll see where it leads.

For Angela, who recently found my blog: welcome! I'm glad you stumbled on it. I hope to see you around a lot. I wanted to address one thing in particular that you said: "Maybe your body doesn't like you skipping lunch and thinks you are starving it." For what it's worth, I don't believe in starvation mode. (That sounds funny, like it's Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.) All the latest research I can find indicates to me that starvation mode is a lot harder to enter than we're made to believe, and that if I am, for instance, lifting weights and actively building/maintaining muscle while cutting calories (even below the 1000-calorie level) then my body realizes it isn't starvation, and just behaves as it should: expending more calories than it takes in, and losing weight. I think there is ample research on this, and I'm doing my own personal experiment on it, I suppose you could say. :) In months and months of doing 24-hour fasts, I never touched my metabolism, it continued to function perfectly. We're pretty resilient creatures.

Onward! Now, with clothes that fit better! (That's a new feature, darling.)

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Now playing: Muse - Exogenesis: Symphony Part 1
via FoxyTunes

Statistics


















Start23 Aug: 159.0
24 Aug: 158.0
25 Aug: 158.0
26 Aug: 157.2
27 Aug: 156.4
28 Aug: 156.8
29 Aug: 156.2
1 Week30 Aug: 156.0
31 Aug: 155.8
1 Sep: 156.0
2 Sep: 154.4
3 Sep: 154.4
4 Sep: 155.4
2 weeks5 Sep: ?camping trip!
6 Sep: 156.0
8 Sep: 155.8
10 Sep: 155.0

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Knock me over with a feather.

I'm at a complete loss how I could possibly be the exact same weight as last week, how I could not continue to lose at least ounces every day. I have avoided six out of seven lunches this last week. I have regulated my portions morning and night; even a huge meal of 600 calories both times would have yielded me only 1200 calories per day, still certainly an amount that should cause loss. And I believe that my meals were lower than that amount probably every time.

So how my Friday weight was upward, and today up further yet, I do not quite comprehend. Still I shall press onward, and see what happens next.