In which I went on a half-assed diet the Monday after Thanksgiving because I was fucking miserable in my own body.
On Thanksgiving day I did not measure my waist, but I’d measured it awhile before so I knew it was 40 inches.
40 inches! My waist! That’s fucking insane! I’m 5’4″; not even my hips should be 40 inches. But there it was, obesity, as a result of a completely unregulated diet.
As you probably know, I fell in love with a boy a few years ago and moved two thousand miles to be with him. He’s awesome and I’m totally glad I did, but, well. He’s male. And he’s 13 years younger than me. He eats whatever the fuck he wants when he wants it, just like I did at his age, and I fell back into the habit of pizza and potatoes and bread and Basmati, because that’s how he eats and it’s nice to eat together.
But I’m not 35! I can’t eat white bread and white rice and pasta and potatoes! (Well, I can, obviously, but not without getting totally fucking fat. Which is what happened. Under the skin of my back is basically a slab of solid fat, from neck to ass. It’s terrible how much fat I’ve packed on this little frame.)
So the Monday after turkey day I went back on the diet I was on 3 years ago when I got so slender: basically, modified vegetarian Atkins. Which means I’m not eating white stuff or refined stuff for the time being, and I’m using an app to track my food intake with the goal of keeping my daily net carbohydrate intake to about 40 grams.
In three weeks, I’ve lost five inches off my waist. Five inches! In three weeks! (I have no idea what I weigh, because we don’t have a scale, but seriously, who gives a fuck what they weigh.)
I feel so much better! Being so fat makes me utterly miserable. My feet and hands swell up and I’m forever exhausted and disinterested and lazy. I had an experience on Thankgsiving weekend when, after getting up from having sat at my desk for a few hours, I found my legs from thighs on down to be so swollen and water-logged that they felt like sausages, and the skin on the bottom of my feet felt like it would split. It was awful.
Not to mention how terrible the hangovers are when your metabolism’s all fucked up. Basically totally incapacitating.
It’s also amazing at how immediately the body responds when you stop feeding it pasta, white rice, potatoes, and white bread at every turn. And no trips to the gym required!
It’s still a diet, in the sense that one must abstain from nomming certain things that taste good (I’m looking at you, Mesa Pizza’s peerless portabello bleu pesto), but it’s so much easier than low-fat calorie-counting. For snacks, I have olives and cheese cubes and walnuts instead of potato chips. Breakfast is eggs with veggies and cheese, or a plate of foule with a hard boiled egg and olive oil. Dinner’s a tuna melt on Jesus bread, or bean & cheese nachos (the number of chips being dependent on my carb count for the day). Heavy cream in one’s coffee is delicious. Very dark chocolate is allowed. Butter on anything you like.
In place of hash browns, I sautée cabbage in butter with salt & pepper. There’s an edible cauliflower “dough” one can use for garlic-cheese “bread” sticks. There’s spaghetti squash as a pasta substitute. You’re never hungry, but you pretty much have to eat at home because restaurant food is — with the exception of, say, burrito or sub sandwich bowls — universally rife with refined carbohydrates.
So, in a couple months I hope to have my waist down to under 30″, and my physical misery vanquished, and my health much improved. (Well, as improved as it can be for a sedentary hedonist, at any rate!)
Being fat sucks. Whenever I get fat, I develop an amazed respect for those persons who are truly grossly obese and still go to work every damned day, and get their laundry done, and raise children. Everything’s so difficult when you’re always tired, always hungry, and too big for comfort. Not to be terribly crass, but when my waist was 40″ around I could barely wipe my own ass: I have no idea how even bigger people manage. My toenails are still dragon talons as I’m waiting for another inch or two to go away before I tend to them; sitting folded in half for even the few minutes it takes to trim and clean one’s toenails is disturbingly uncomfortable when you’re too fat to bend over your own gut.
Furthermore, I feel terrible that a lot of really big people are big because they’re poorer and have to buy the cheaper food, most of which is nothing but low-fat refined carbohydrates, like boxed mac ‘n’ cheese, TV dinners, ramen bowls, and drinks, and also that the government is still endorsing the low-fat diet theory publicly even though it’s been thoroughly debunked by over forty years of study.
At any rate, I got fucking huge, which often happens in new relationships, and it was fun while it lasted, but I’m off white bread and potatoes and I’ll be back to normal by spring. Smooches!
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I knew you were a fan of low-carb, so I was shocked by the ridiculous amounts of carbage you’ve been posting about on FB and Twitter the last few years. And, when you’d make a comment about your weight, I’d think, “Well, duh, look at all the crap you’re eating.” But, I shut up about it because I figured with your job situation, it might be simple economics driving your dietary choices. Anyway, I’m glad you’re back on track with a better diet.
My own situation is the exact opposite. My low-ish carb, habit-driven eating patterns keep my 6’1″ frame in the 170-171 pound range pretty much all the time. Unfortunately, with my sweetie being in poor health the past 2+ years, the stress on me has now twice caused excessive, unwanted weight loss. Last year, over the course of ~6 months, my weight slowly dropped to below 157 (and, during a period of her health improving somewhat, my appetite roared back, and I quickly shot up to 175 ). Last month, the situation became much worse, and I dropped from 170 to below 164 in 2 weeks, resulting in a massive hypoglycemic crash. I’m now eating pizza, bread, and ice cream just to keep my weight from dropping any further.
Oh, man, so sorry about your sweetie and for all your worry. 🙁
But the ‘lol im fat’ comments were ironic, of course, as I know very well that I’m not able to eat fettucini alfredo regularly, let alone white rice and pizza, without gaining weight.
The only ways one can stay on a diet, permanently and forever, are extreme vanity or actual health concerns. As I’ve never been truly unhealthy, I don’t have the very strong impetus to keep eating in ways that are, if we’re honest, often unfriendly or uncomfortable in social situations. And, as I’m pushing 50, not performing, and have a very loving partner, my vanity’s assuaged so I don’t really care if I’m plump.
Of course, if one gets diagnosed with something terrible, then, yes, a permanent diet change could possibly be managed, but we’ve seen far too many people.say ‘fuck it’ and eat what they like, considering that a life well-lived is better than a long one full of annoying austerity.
As I say above, the LC diet is much easier than any other diet, but it’s still a diet and you have to be a snowflake to stay on it constantly. You have to refuse your aunt’s famous herb dressing, your grandmother’s buttermilk mashed potatoes, your coworker’s thoughtful gift of a pastry from the patissiere. You can’t cook any (vegetarian) recipe as-is; you have to sub the starch for cauliflower or cabbage and after a couple of years it gets tedious. You can’t eat with your beloved, either, who is still eating as the culture eats and suffers neither from type II nor vanity, which is definitely a quality-of-life concern: do I want to stay thin, or do I want to eat with my partner? It’s just a pizza.
I was slipping before I hooked up with Scott, though. Family, public eating… being a vegetarian is bad enough without saying, “Oh, hold the pita. And the rice. And the French fries. And the–” Fuck that. At first, you just leave it on the plate, eventually you’re like, “Shit, I paid for that. So wasteful, just over some vanity.” And then it’s 30 months later and you’re fat. *shrug* And then you go back on a diet, because you’re now fat enough to know you’re likely to develop actual diseases, not to mention you’re just plain uncomfortable.
I doubt I’ll ever stay on it full-time; when I did it as a rule but not as a diet I was a little pudgy, but okay with my size and diet. I care a lot more about comfort than either health or looks, apparently , and I’m never comfortable over a size 12!
Also, thanks for commenting! It’s probably the third this year!
Hey, now you see why I never had pasta in the house? (Except for the occasional Mac & Cheese I’d buy for you kids when you’d whine about it).
Total accident of course ‘cus I can’t stand pasta but still. I had thought you kids wouldn’t be all enamored of that crap since it wasn’t in the house much. It’s icky. Made from slug slime. They grab slugs off the ground and squeeze them to get all the slime out, then they make pasta with it. Blech.
You’re weird. Pasta is made of flour, just like all the white bread and hamburger buns and Saltines I know you eat because I’ve seen you do it.
🙂