The Journey of a Thousand Miles begins Beneath One's Feet

It is difficult to know where exactly to begin.

I know that I weighed nearly three hundred pounds in high school. I say nearly because I wouldn't have gotten on a scale if you'd paid me. I know that I was at the very least 280, but was likely close to 300. I had steadily gained weight starting about the age of eight or so. In the seventh grade I broke my leg, and the doctor told my mother to put me on a diet. My mother, never believing that fat was bad for anyone, put me on a low calorie diet that was not a low fat diet too. I lost quite a bit of weight and was in a size 12, which is still pretty chunky but was an improvement. But then I was very hungry all the time, and the weight crept back on. The size 12 pants got tight, and then the 14s got tight, and before I knew it I was in a size 26 (in women's pants). I was teased relentlessly and called all sorts of names. I remember there was a girl who lost a lot of weight in high school, but I assumed that she did it by starving herself. Now I wonder if she hadn't done Atkins.

Some time after high school, I went to the mall. There were a pair of pants at PacSun that I liked. They didn't make them in a big enough size for me, and that's when I decided to really do something about my weight. Again, I did the calorie restriction, and I lost down to about 220 or so. You can only starve yourself so long though. And 1200 calories a day is starving. The reason why it works is because you are restricting carbohydrates too, and so your insulin is lower, and since your insulin is lower, the fat is let out of the fat cells. Things go so much better without so much hunger if you cut the carbs. And this is why I couldn't maintain the starvation diet. I really tried not to eat very much. My body didn't want to stay at 220 though, it wanted to go back up. I didn't understand why. My sister ate whatever she wanted and in whatever quantity she wanted, never counting anything and was a size 0, and still is now in her thirties.

I had never heard of Atkins, until I met my husband. His mother knew about Atkins since the 1970s. If you read my last post you'll know that I had never heard any of this and there was no internet as we know it now in the early 90s when I was in high school, so I had no way of knowing any of this. The doctors didn't tell me. No one told me.

I went on the Atkins diet in 2002 at the suggestion of my future mother-in-law. I lost down to 163 lbs. It was the least I'd weighed since I was in middle school and lost weight the first time. However, this didn't last. I went off to college in another state, and eating the cafeteria food I didn't gain fifteen pounds. I gained fifty and then some. By the summer before my senior year, my weight had crept back up to 240. I was wearing a size 44 in Men's Wrangler jeans. That summer I did a summer camp at the school for high school students. I was sorta like a camp counselor. We couldn't leave the campus to go anywhere, but we were permitted to go to the gym. With a couple of the other students I worked with inspiring me, I became a gym rat. It's the only time in my life I've been a gym rat. I worked out two to three hours every day. I stopped eating so much in the cafeteria, limiting myself to a small plate. Over the summer, I lost thirty pounds and was into a size 40 in Wrangler's. This was an improvement, but considering the amount I was working out and how much less I was eating over a two month period you'd have thought I'd have lost more, if you believe the mainstream nutritional wisdom.

My senior year was busy, and the weight crept back on very slowly. I took a job a couple of months after graduation, and before I knew it, I was pushing back into size 44 pants. And so again, I started going to the gym at our apartment complex, walking on the beach, eating healthy whole grains, and I managed to get down to about 200 pounds. And that was it. There was no going any lower. Through absolute willpower, I kept my weight in the 200-225 range for three years. I was so hungry, and the weight would creep back on and I'd fight it back off. I tried not to eat very much. I certainly didn't enjoy my food, and any time someone brought something like donuts I felt guilty eating even one. When you're 200 lbs and eat a donut, everyone looks at you like you're a glutton. Even if you nibble it.

In 2010, my mother-in-law sent me Gary Taubes book, Good Calories, Bad Calories and told me to read it. As I said in my previous post, I was angry. All this time the health authorities knew this. They KNEW that low carb worked to lose weight. Not only worked, but kept the weight off. I'm still pissed. I wasted years of my life trying to lose weight. At this point I was close to 225 lbs, again.

I didn't really want to do low carb. It meant giving up food that I liked. In the end though, one has to decide what they like more. As I said before, I have a casein allergy. Things have been given up for that too. When you decide that it's worth it, that you'll feel better not eating the foods you like, and that there are plenty of tasty low carb foods, then it's not so difficult to do. The low carb helped me immensely but because of the dairy allergy, by itself it wasn't a panacea. My husband dropped weight on low carb like it was going out of style. I on the other hand, got stuck, and began to question the validity of all of this. It's valid all right. I believe that if it doesn't work for someone, if they're not cheating on it - as this is not a diet you can cheat on, then there is something else wrong with them. If you've tried low carb and I mean really tried it and you got stuck in a plateau and you couldn't break it, I'd look into other metabolic or food allergy problems.

To be continued...

Fat and Sick: The Big Lie

I'm not sure exactly what day it was, but it was about three years ago when I came to the realization that most of what we are told are lies. I know, you're thinking, but how can that be? How can everything be lies? Hang in there, and I'll explain. I'm not saying that there is necessarily malice behind the lies, although in some cases there might be. I think that part of it is the sheer volume of information that is out there, the inability of most people to sort through all of it, and the powers that control the narrative that 'goes viral'.

In the Spring of 2010, I read Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories. I got about a hundred pages into it and was so angry, I wanted to destroy something. Why was I angry? I was angry because medical science has known about the carbohydrate hypothesis of weight gain since at least the 19th century. THE NINETEENTH F*ING CENTURY! Now, I weighed three hundred pounds in high school. You read that correctly, three hundred pounds. Do you think anyone ever at any point in my life said to me, hun, maybe you need to cut back on carbohydrates? Hell no. They said I ate too much (I was so hungry). They said I didn't exercise enough (it's difficult when you're so fat). They said fat was bad for you. But carbohydrates? I didn't even know what a carbohydrate was until I was probably twenty-five. No one in my world talked about carbohydrates. People may have on occasion said that sugar would rot my teeth, but I didn't drink regular soda. I also don't particularly have a sweet tooth for candy either. So I never made the connection.

My problems went beyond the carbohydrate consumption however (this is not the case for others in my family whose problems were solely carbohydrate driven). I was born with a severe casein allergy that caused internal bleeding and I was in the hospital when I was ten days old. My parents thought I was dying. My grandmother figured it was the milk. I was put on Nutramagen, an amino based baby formula that was prescription. The doctor told my parents that I would outgrow the milk allergy. By the time I was five, my mother let me consume things with milk in them, but I was never a fan of milk straight or on cereal because it made my stomach hurt. If taken straight with nothing diluting it or a large amount, milk would make me feel as if someone was stabbing me with knives in the gut. No one in my family investigated why milk made my stomach hurt, or the insane weight gain that began after I started consuming milk products. It was bad healthcare all around. I had severe and chronic ear infections, which is associated with milk allergy. Did the doctor think, hmm, this child was milk allergy when an infant and has ear infection every other week, maybe I should look into this. No. Not no, but hell no. Instead it was tubes, scarred ear drums, and adenoids removed. No one had a clue about anything. So I suffered from ridicule and scorn for being three hundred pounds for something that I had no inkling about and therefore no control over. I was three hundred pounds, not because I ate too much or didn't exercise enough, but because of a milk allergy causing severe intestinal inflammation and elevated insulin from probably consuming excess carbohydrates in conjunction with said allergy.

If you are normal weight without trying, congratulations! You have a correctly functioning body. That's all. It's nothing you've done. You're not magically eating right and exercising. Your endocrine system is whirring away keeping everything operating in the manner it's supposed to. So next time you see a three hundred pound person and think to yourself something, I want you to think, they have something physiologically wrong with them. Because no one wants to be three hundred pounds. No one. Eating less and moving more doesn't work. If it did work, there wouldn't be anyone overweight. And no one has bloody told them that they should try something else. So, there's one lie. There's of course many others, most outside the scope of a single blog. I'm not sure how anyone can say this lie with a straight face, it being so obviously wrong, but they do. The powers that spout said lie, might not be privy to the fact that it's a lie, but I think in most cases, that is not the case. They know. It's monetarily beneficial to a lot of people that you remain fat and sick. Fat and sick people are easily controlled. They don't care about politics, or what is going on in the world. They just want to feel better. This is human nature, and the powers that be know it.