The generosity of plus sized clothes

Plus sized clothes are very generous and forgiving. This is a good thing and a sometimes a tiny-bit of a bad thing. Most of the clothes I wear on a regular basis were purchased when I was around 220 lbs. Which is a weight I have been sitting at for a couple of years now. At this weight I am approximately a size 14.

I noticed that at nearly 240 lbs I could still wear all of these clothes, but the pants were getting tight and the sweaters were not hiding my belly as much as I like. I also know that at 200 lbs I can wear the same clothes and they are simply a bit looser giving me a bit of an illusion of a flat belly.

So, basically my plus sized clothing has a range of at least 40lbs, possibly 60 lbs. The good part about that is that I don’t have to buy clothes for each 10 lb increment. The tiny-bad part about it is that I don’t have to buy clothes for each 10 lb increment which means it requires significant weight loss to actually cue anyone that I have changed sizes.

There is another major benefit to plus sized clothing, its cut differently than clothing in ‘regular’ sizes. Tops are generally longer, bottoms have a bit of elasticity. This is flattering because when the body is not cut at the waist you don’t highlight the belly area.  This is one reason I’m not very sure if I ever really want to be lower than a size 12 mostly because I love the cuts of plus size clothes and hate how revealing I feel most ‘regular’ sizes are.

Frustrated

I have reached that inevitable point in any life style change, weight loss, diet, trying-to-do-something-new process where there is failure and now I am feeling frustrated by it.

It is a completely inconsequential failure, unless I let it have consequences.

After reaching my 20 lb goal, I have had an incredibly minor set back. A 1.2 lb set back to be precise.

I was prepared for this. In fact, I thought I was going to have a set back before I hit my goal since I had a whole weekend of eating out with our families. I was more than pleased when I managed to maintain through that. Then I hit my goal – yay! Happy dance! And then the next day I gained 0.4 lbs, and then another 0.4 lbs and then another 0.4 lbs and I started to lose my calm, just a little bit.

Part of it was the weight gain, part of it was that I couldn’t explain the weight gain. I was keeping within my caloric range. On day one I had come close to max calories but not over and on day three I had had some alcohol, but not more than my daily calories worth.

What bothers me most is how bothered I am by all of this.

If I am going to make this healthy change permanent and not fail yet again I cannot let myself be so distressed by a measly 1.2lb gain. I need to look at the big picture. I need to remember that there are other factors of success like how I feel, how I am fitting into my clothes, my mood and energy levels.

So, this is my confession. I let myself be frustrated by a 1.2 lb gain that will likely not matter in a month. Now, I need to go live my life and make sure I stay committed to my goals and realize this is a very small trivial matter.

GOAL: 20 lbs!

Happy to announce that this morning I reached my 20 lb weight loss goal!

Start (again): 237.8 lbs
Current: 217.8 lbs

It hasn’t all been healthy weight loss. But, I’m now convinced that I am eating regularly, and losing weight at a steady slow pace rather than through unhealthy starvation.

There aren’t too many noticeable differences with this weight loss. No one has commented or noticed that I am losing weight. My clothes fit slightly better, but I do not need smaller sizes yet, I have simply averted having to purchase larger sizes.

This 20 lbs has been “easy” weight loss. I have not felt hungry, tired or irritated. I think the shock I put my body through at the loss of my brother has a lot to do with how well I transitioned into my current eating pattern without any of these side effects.

I have been able to lose this weight without any non-digestive related food denial.

What the heck does that mean?

There are still a number of things that upset my digestive since my brother passed, and I have steered clear of those foods – and there are a lot of them. But, I have not told myself I cannot have things that I do want and can have.

The biggest changes I have made are simply to:

• eat regularly, including breakfast
• avoid foods I am allergic to, or that upset my digestive
• drink water or tea if I feel hungry at an unplanned time
• allow myself to eat more if I do feel hungry after the water or tea
• avoid refined sugars, sugary drinks and diet artificial sugar drinks
• track what I eat (mostly)

My reward for hitting the 20 lb mark is to go get my hair cut.

Bad Food Choices

I noticed in my last entry that I mentioned my weight was consistently going up when I made bad food choices.

That choice of words has given me pause. What do I mean by bad food choices?

First of I find it interesting that I still use the word “bad”. I could have chosen: poor, negative, unhealthy, junk or others. But I chose bad which demonstrates that I’m still using a lot of value judgement with my food.

It also runs counter to what I said in and earlier post about listening to The Fat Nutritionist and giving myself permission to eat.

So, my vocabulary is showing some cracks in the philosophy I am trying to adopt, but I do think I am learning.

What “bad” food choices mean for me right now are:

1. Mindless eating
2. Allergy eating
3. Uncontrolled eating

Mindless eating is see-food, eat-food. For example I was playing a game in the university cafeteria (some friends and I meet there sometimes for gaming). That night when the Tim Hortons staff came out and dumped tonnes of bins of donuts, muffins, cookies, timbits, croissants, cinnamon buns and more. All the students in the cafeteria descended and started grabbing food. When all this started I wasn’t hungry, I don’t really like donuts that much, I really don’t like Tim Horton’s donuts, especially day old going stale donuts… then one member of our group put three bags of chips in the middle of the table. As the evening went on, I don’t remember when I decided to have chips, timbits or more chips, but I did. They didn’t taste good or satisfy a craving. I just ate them because they were in front of me and other people were eating.

Allergy eating is when I ignore that certain foods make me feel awful but I eat them anyways. This often goes with either mindless eating. Sometimes it happens with social eating. It goes with mindless when I don’t really think about what all the ingredients are of what I am putting into my body. With social eating I hate feeling like the high-maintenance picky eater and I feel like I’m being a nuisance to others when I ask too many questions about food. Because food is so social I don’t want to upset the social balance so I eat things even when I suspect they are bad for me just to keep the social balance.

Uncontrolled eating is mostly alcohol. I have a very high tolerance for alcohol, I’m still usually in happy-drunk mode around drink 12-15. What I have figured out is that anything over usually drink 3 is going to tip the scales. But, since most of my friends know I can drink and I don’t want to feel like a priest at a pageant I often let my guard down and allow myself to drink more alcohol than I intended. This goes back to the mindless see-food, eat-food problem.

In other words I’m okay to give myself permission to eat chips, pop or ice cream if that is what my body is truly craving. But, when I eat it simply because it is there, despite it being bad for me or because I didn’t manage my alcohol consumption I see these as “bad” food choices.

Leveling Off?

After my brother’s death I had a lot of problems with food. It took me almost two months to make it back onto solid food, and I had lost nearly 20 lbs. Of course, as I know from previous failed starvation diet attempts simply depriving the body of food is a terrible way to lose weight and keep it off. I was expecting to gain approximately 2lbs for every pound I lost… and maybe that still will happen, but I hope not.

I took it easy getting back into food. The first foods I was able to eat were really crap high sodium soups like Lipton cup of soup. I gained five pounds of water retention almost right away. From there I worked my way up to soft foods like mushed up avocado… or to make it sound better “hurray for guacamole!”

Aside from the soups which had some noodles once I was off those I have more or less managed to stick with a paleo diet. Although I’ve decided not to worry about it too much when I eat out. I may have to re-think this if I eat out more frequently.

I gave myself two weeks to adjust to real food before deciding to actually start monitoring myself for any kind of weight loss. My weight did bounce around all over the place in the first week and started to stabilize in the second week. I realize a week is probably not enough time, but I need a starting point so I drew an arbitrary line in the sand on Monday.

And there it is: 225 lbs.

That is just over 10 lbs down in total. So it looks like I gained back half of my starvation diet weight.

This number feels odd to me right now. A year ago this would have been one of my heaviest weights of the past two years and would have me feeling bad about myself. But, coming down from 237.8 the comparatively lower 225 lbs feels good.

My clothes have returned to fitting, whereas at 237.8 I was beginning to feel like I would need to buy new sizes.

It also means I have met several rewards that I need to give myself:

1 lb – manicure – done!

2 lbs – lip / eye wax – done!

5 lbs – movie rental – done!

10 lbs – pedicure – need to do.

What About Exercise?

Diet and exercise.

Healthy Eating and Active Living.

They are almost always paired together. But, there is increasing evidence that it is diet, not exercise that plays the key role in weight loss.

I encountered this idea the first time I hired a personal trainer. At some point the trainer said something to the effect that weight loss was 80% diet and 20% exercise. More recently I’ve started to see numerous articles published citing that it is diet, not exercise that is key to weight loss.

MSNBC: Diet, not exercise plays a key role in weight loss.
Time Magazine: Why exercise won’t make you thin
Mayo Clinic: Better to cut calories or exercise more?
Guardian: Why exercise won’t make you thin

As this idea gets unpacked a familiar food-politics theme emerges: the role of the food industry in our health and nutrition. More specifically what the food industry will do to protect their profits at the expense of the health of the public.

Here are some more articles on this topic:

University of California Berkley: Lecture, Dr. Marion Nestle How The Food Industry Influences Diet and Health
How The Food Industry Influences Diet and Health (book)

One of the best examples I have seen recently of food-politics promoting exercise over nutrition is Coca-Cola Canada’s partnership with participACTION and sponsorship of  Sogo Active. This campaign promotes getting youth active.  It has great examples of programs that get youth active, but it completely fails to mention that drinking Coke is really bad for your health.

This is not to say that exercise is not important. Exercise does some pretty important things like: strengthens bones and muscles, improves mental health and mood, lowers blood pressure, improves cholesterol and reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, breast cancer and colon cancer.

I will credit my reasonably active lifestyle with the fact that although I am in an obese BMI range I have not faced any serious health problems, or even minor health problems. Except for the fact that I am fat, I’m healthy. The fact that I’m healthy, and reasonably active led me to my own conclusions about the role of exercise in weight loss.

Each time I have tried to lose weight in the past I have included exercise as a key component of that weight loss. And, I have generally been more successful at getting myself active than I have at being mindful about what I am eating and how it is effecting me. My general assumption was that I don’t eat a lot of junk food (I think), and if I’m exercising everyday and eating reasonably ‘good’ foods then I should be able to lose weight.

Sadly, this has never, in ten years proved true. My assumption at this point for why this hasn’t works are two-fold.

First, I don’t think I have taken a close enough look at what it means to have a healthy relationship with food. To truly make a food lifestyle change. I’ll come back to this in other entries.

Second, I think that I am proving case in point that while exercise is good for my health, and is likely the reason I am as healthy as I am, it is not having any significant impact on my weight.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to give myself permission to shun all physical activity. I will however, be placing much more emphasis on learning to eat well, in a way that makes me happy, healthy and facilitates weight loss. I will not be putting a significant amount of emphasis on if I made it to this gym each morning.

Why Paleo?

I’ve mentioned the Paleo Diet in the last few entries without explaining why I’m trying it. If you want information that will tell you why it is awesome, or that it will help you shed pounds or feel better, increase muscle mass and cure your long term illnesses then you are looking for a different blog.

The reason I am interested in this diet is mostly pragmatic. I’m not supposed to eat dairy or gluten. The Paleo diet suggests you don’t eat dairy or grains… and a few other things. So, this is not about trying to strictly follow an ideological diet that I believe will produce particular tangible results for me. Instead it is about finding a food philosophy that other people are likely to recognize and publish recipes for, so that I can use their hard recipe work to make healthy meals for myself.

Food Acceptance and Food Allergies

When I first started thinking about this journey again the biggest question in my mind was what can I do differently this time that will help me succeed when I have failed so many times before. It was at this point that I came across the Fat Nutritionist. A friend of mine who also struggles with personal health and fitness issues introduced me to the blog via Facebook and I was hooked.

Instead of talking about what food you should and should not eat, she starts with going back to the basics of teaching yourself to eat again. Her main theory is that people who are over or under weight, have at some point, developed an unhealthy relationship with food. We have disconnected food from our body’s signals. We are no longer able to intuitively manage our relationship with food in a healthy way. So, instead of staring from a place of discussing what you should eat (and shouldn’t) she starts with instilling good eating habits.

The first and most important of her habits is permission. She has a few long entries on the subject of permission, I suggest you head over there to read them if you are interested. In a nutshell what it boils down to is the idea that so long as you are punishing yourself for what you are eating you are cultivating a negative relationship to food. Permission means acknowledging that you are giving yourself the permission to have the craving and satisfy the craving. You are not powerless over the chips, and you do not have to punish yourself for eating the chips.

From the concept of permission she works through a number of eating lessons that can help a develop a self-awareness of what I am eating, when I am eating it and why I am eating it.

All of this sounds really good, and I began to implement some of it. Specifically acknowledging and accepting my cravings, trying to be aware of my level of hunger or fullness and scheduling regular meal times.

I was also keenly aware that I fell into many of the traps she identified. Things like “the last supper syndrome” , blaming and shaming my food habits and more. So, I was thinking of joining one of her regular eating groups to get a handle on my eating.

There is however one complication: food allergies.

I have one anaphylaxis allergy – Pork

One long-time food allergy – Dairy

One newly diagnosed food intolerance – Gluten

Avoiding pork has never been much of an issue for me. Even once I started eating meat again after years of being vegan my meat is generally fish, chicken and sometimes beef.

Dairy has been more challenging. Because it is a non-life threatening allergy that generally just comes with a lot of discomfort and some ugly digestive side effects I sometimes allow dairy to slip into my diet. Sometimes cheesecake tastes good enough to take the pain.

A few years ago I was noticing even when I was not including dairy and was specifically avoiding it I was having similar digestive problems. At the worst a bad dairy attack can make me feel like I have a flu for up to 48 hours. And without the dairy I was still feeling the same. I eventually brought it up with my doctor who after some referrals for tests and nutrition tells me I’m also gluten intolerant. This is not good. Bread and Pasta are two of the great loves of my life.

So, I find myself in this odd space between trying to accept my food and food cravings while feeling resentful and limited in what I can actually eat and feel well. Enter the Paleo Diet.

Revisiting the plan

Before the grief there was a plan slowly starting to form.

While I am comfortable being a woman of size, I am not happy with my current size and it is beginning to effect my quality of life. I am not interested in becoming stick thin again or inviting the health and psychological problems of trying to get there.

The challenge I had put before myself was to lose weight and size slowly and incrementally. I wanted to do it this way so that I could:

• Be evaluative of each step and when I felt good and wanted to stop,
• Ensure that the slow approach would keep the weight that I lost off,
• Not pressure myself to lose X lbs in Y time frame and beat myself up when that didn’t happen,
• Truly evaluate what works for my body,
• Explore what nutrition means to me, what tastes good to eat and what feels good in my body.

There were three main tools I had set up to try to achieve this.

1. Weight loss rewards

I have never been a rewards person, but I think this may have been a mistake. There is part of me that thinks that achieving a goal should be reward enough. However, my track record tells me that this is not enough for me. So, I set up a chart with a goal of a 20 lb weight loss. I set rewards at 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 and 20 lbs. The idea was to keep myself motivated and then evaluate at 20 lbs. Decide if I felt up to going for another 20 or if I wanted to simply try to maintain for some time. In this way the parameters were either weight loss that was not constricted by time, or time for maintenance with no weight loss expectation.

2. Self acceptance monitoring

This is harder to articulate as a tool. Although I am not comfortable with my current size I am comfortable being a woman of size. I like curves, breasts, hips, tummy and softness. I am also generally happy with my life and the parts that I am not happy with I feel that I can do something to change. Part of the slow incremental weight loss needs to be a mindfulness to keep an eye on my positive sense of self.

Wading into the weight loss challenge is a good way to turn negative. To start to degrade my body and my self. Some would see it as self empowerment, but I find this is only true while success is happening. If success is not a straight road – which it rarely is – then it is easy to slide into self depreciation. Once the downward cycle begins then it is hard to appreciate any success. Small success are no longer enough, it becomes a game of the long goal in the distance that is never achieved.

To help with self-acceptance I am making sure that I keep subscribing to Plus Model Magazine, which is where I get many of my images and keep reading size acceptance blogs.

3. Paleo Diet

Through various failed diets I have realized that I do need some guidance for what I put into my body and that guidance has to be more than calorie-based. I came to the idea of trying the paleo diet not from a weight loss perspective but from the ability to help me manage some of my food allergies and still eat a well balanced diet. It also promotes local food and seasonal food as well, and helps me increase my protein intake which I know is needed.

You Live and You Die

I write my blogs and then schedule them to appear approximately one week apart. The day before my last blog entry was published my younger brother died suddenly, unexpectedly and without cause.

He was 30 years and 28 days. We were close. We had recently had a nice long visit to celebrate his 30th birthday. I was teasing him gently about turning 30, but went on to explain how much more I was enjoying my 30s than my 20s. In my 30s I feel like I have found myself. I am more confident, less anxious and take life in stride. My brother was an amazing person, he was already a phenomenal young man and I was looking forward to watching him finish his graduate studies, travel, raise a family and become a phenomenal old man.

I was at work when I got the news. It started by my mother leaving a voice mail on my phone that she had received a call from my brother’s land lady who said tenants had phoned her to say there were police at his apartment. She had contacted my Dad who lives in Hamilton and he was on his way over. I was in a meeting when my mother called. When I got the voice mail around 11:00 a.m. I called my Dad immediately. My Dad told me and I collapsed at work. I remember being on the floor with people asking me what was wrong and just saying over and over that my brother was dead.

The next few days are a blur. We went to Hamilton to meet my Dad, and we began a very surreal journey navigating the coroner and police investigation. Because he was young there was an investigation and an autopsy. We were told by the police and coroner that there was no sign of any criminal cause of death. What this means – and it took me some time to unpack it with the coroner – is that there was no indication of homicide or suicide. We asked for a full autopsy, which was scheduled to be done in this case anyways and received the results a few days later. There was no known cause of death. Except for being dead he was the picture of health.

He always had been healthy. He was incredibly conscious of his footprint on this earth. All his foods were organic and local. A little over a year ago he had biked across the country coming back from B.C. where he did his undergraduate studies. He was active, fit, rock climbed. Never preachy or self righteous. He led by example and those who knew him wanted to follow.

We were able to do a 100% green funeral including environmentally friendly embalming fluid (who knew?) and a fully green burial where his body is placed in an eco-conservation in a burlap wrap. We used a 100% local wood casket for the viewing that was all hand made and included no nails or varnish or stain so the wood can be fully recycled.

The best we can figure, and I have no medical basis for this besides a suggestion from the coroner and my own internet digging is that he died of one of a variety of Sudden Adult Death Syndromes you can find more information here: http://www.sads.ca/ He had no warning signs, unlike 50% of cases, and to our knowledge we have no genetic history of SADS, although it is difficult to tell since my father never knew his father, and his mother was an orphan.

There are really no words to express this loss. Everything I say has been said before, and will be said again.

I am lucky, I have been surrounded by friends and family who have been doing their best to support me and they are helping quite a lot. We had a beautiful memorial in a local pub that was packed and we celebrated his life. Friends and family continue to reach out to me to help, and it does day by day.

I could get much more esoteric here and wax on about the grieving process, but I am going to try to keep this blog close to the topic of my health journey.

It likely goes without saying that this kind of grief has a very real physical impact and in terms of plans for getting in shape and eating right throws everything out the window.

I was fully prepared to be an emotional guilt eater. I even emailed a friend in the first few days and told her I may need some company for some no-judgement guilt eating and drinking. Turns our this is not how my body reacts. It was day 8 after his death that I realized I had not consumed anything aside from mint tea. It was day 10 before I was willing to even try to look at food as something that does in fact go into my body.

By the time I was ready to start consuming food again I had dealt my system such a shock that it didn’t want food. My first few attempts were disasters. Even basic broth soup would not stay down at first. A friend of mine helped to put me on a juice diet. We used lots of light juices that contained ginger because ginger helps digestive. We also discovered I could drink some sweet juices with banana which were staying down after a few days.

It has been almost six weeks now and I am only now tentatively back on solid foods.

Part of my plan, before my life fell apart, was to try to transition onto a Paleo Diet. This was part of the plan not so much from a weight loss perspective but to help me navigate some food allergy issues.

From a health and eating perspective grief has been helpful and hurtful.

On the “silver lining” side, I have dropped nearly 20 pounds without trying. I’m also significantly less hungry and interested in food than I can ever remember being. I’m in a place where I need to remember to eat and make a conscious effort to put food into my body. So, over eating is not an issue at the moment.

On the hurtful side I know that this weight is likely to come back on now that I am eating again and might come with a 2-4-1 pound deal. I have put my body through a very unhealthy starvation and I know my body is in shock. I will need to be prepared for my body and digestive to go through some real yo-yo changes as I try to re-acclimatize to how I should eat, which now has a whole new dynamic than it did in early March.