Bizy-ness

I've been waiting for a baby to arrive this week, so I never knew what was happening on any given day. I still made some plans.

I had a lunch date with a guy I'd met online. We had coffee last weekend, and he wasn't disgusted by me enough to never want to see me again. Yes, I still think about physical self this way. But we really weren't clicking and I don't think we'll be seeing each other again.

My friend's water broke on Thursday night, so from then on I was just waiting until they needed me to come over and stay with their 4 year old. C and I get along really well, but spending two days with a girl that age can be exhausting if you're not used to it. I was at their house from Saturday morning about 8am until late last night when her other Mommy came home to stay with her.

Their house is full of carbolicious food, and very little protein. That's probably another reason I'm exhausted today. I decided not to measure this week until tomorrow, because I'm sure I'm completely bloated with water. I get all those red dents on my skin if it touches anything for too long.

Though, I did get some exercise. Pushing a stroller is good for your arms -- more tricept work than I expected!

***************
I have been musing this week on a passing thought I had when I weighed in last week. I wasn't all that happy with my weight loss and I thought "Why won't my body do I what I want?" Instantly I had the answer. "That's the wrong question. It should be why won't I do what my body wants?" I know what it wants. When I do those things its happy and feels good and I lose weight. You know drink lots of water, get some exercise, not eat a bunch of crappy nutrionless carbs.

Daughter of My People

The F-Word is writing about women and social eating today. A lot of it was pretty typical stuff, brownies in the office, getting "permission" from the women around you to eat, etc. Then I got to this:

The International Journal of Eating Disorders recently reported that daughters of mothers who like to diet have a tendency to binge and overeat. In fact, three of the most powerful risk factors for the development of an eating disorder, reports ANRED, are a mother who diets, a sister who diets and/or friends who diet.

“A lot of kids are growing up with mums whose own eating is troubled,” says Orbach. ‘”Mothers can have the best intentions, but they’re often dieting or talking about how fat they are or how they shouldn’t be eating this. It becomes embedded in a girl’s mind that she should be worried about food. She doesn’t even know there’s anything wrong with that idea.”

My mother has always been a bit obsessed with her weight. She was also obsessed with my sister's and my weight. She was so restrictive about what we could eat after school, that she put locks on the cabinets. Of course, she was never willing to acknowledge that 10 and 11 year old children are growing and therefore hungry at 4 0'clock in the afternoon. She started worrying about my sister's weight when my sister was still an infant. Like 9 months old.

My sister is a naturally stocky sort of person. She inherited my father's build when means she's a bit knocked kneed and very barrel chested. I don't mean that she has she has big boobs. Well, she does, but I'm talking about her rib cage. Broad back, broad shoulders, even when she was rail thin. But all my mother saw was fat, and had the poor kid on diet from early times.

I came along after. I inherited my mother's build -- narrow back, long, fine bones, long legs. Not exactly the kind of kid people describe as "coltish", but when I was in high school people use to talk to me about being a model. In my freshman year of high school I was 5'9", 135 lbs, and on a diet. I thought I was kind of fat. And my mother did not attempt, ever, to dissuade me of this idea. She didn't exactly encourage me to go on diets with her and my sister who was always thought to need to diet away the size of her ribcage, but she certainly welcomed me into the fold with open arms. "Couldn't hurt to lose a few."

My mother is not entirely to blame for all this. My grandmother, who I absolutely adored, was just as bad. Around my senior year in high school when I was maybe 150, my grandmother came for a visit, and the first words out of her mouth (really, she was still giving me a hug) were "You're getting a little bit chubby, aren't you?" Now granted, for someone with my build, 150 might be a few pounds over ideal, especially since I wasn't really athletic, so it wasn't muscle. But chubby? I think not.

So I spent the last 20 years screwing up my metabolism by dieting. Now I'm trying to fix it with a low-carb eating plan and a few drugs to smack down the impulsive eating. Apparently, I'm going to have to also bitch-slap the voices of several generations of women in my family, too.

Can we all take a vow, right now, that we won't do this to our daughters? We want them to be healthy and this sure isn't.

Can I be self-accepting and on a diet at the same time?

I was reading The Rotund who was writing about bad days and being bombarded by bad news. And she said:

So the rebellion becomes two-fold. 1) You have to make the initial choice to embrace your body as it is. 2) You have to continue to believe in your own conviction, despite constant messages from others that you are wrong.

I want to learn to embrace my body and also not be fat. The reality is, even if I lose a lot of weight, that my body will still have flaws. It will be too lumpy in one place or too flat in another. My nose will still be too wide and my head too small. I want to learn to love myself. And this one of the great lessons of the fat acceptance movement. But I also don't want to be fat.

Can I love myself and be committed to changing at the same time? And this flows over into other aspects of myself, not just my body. Can I love myself, my disordered brain and the personality that comes with it, while still trying to funtion more "normally"?

In other news, the Tanita tells me I only weigh 224, but still have the same body fat percentage that I've been getting based on height/weight/measurements with an online calculator. So I'm fatter than I thought, but I weigh less. I think this means that I'm even more out of shape than previously imagined. With the emphasis on imagined. Nearly half of me is solid fat. Which I find kind of gross to think about.

These photos I took last August, but I'm about the same right now:


Though I rarely look this good when I look in the mirror. Especially without clothes on.