Weighty Matters

It’s possible that I’ve had more carbs and sweets in a few days than I usually eat in a few weeks. I should probably be upset with myself but when the food is as delicious as it been, I’m really not.

Each year up here we put together quality meals. People take the lead or team up to prepare for the group as a whole. There’s bread from an excellent organic bakery and organic produce fresh picked from the farm across the road.

It makes me determined that if I’m going to veer from the low carb path, I will only do so for high quality products. None of that crappy store bought bread for me.

I have to admit that I feel a little bloated and my stomach and system have been a little out of sorts, but my taste buds are delighted.

Even the desserts have been great, including my brownies.

To compensate I’ve at least exercised a little with some paddle boarding, tai chi, and at least one power walk around the farm.

My time away ends tomorrow, then I have a couple days of staycation. I firmly pledge to get back on track. I may even do a couple of days of fruit and veggie smoothies and protein shakes to straighten out my system. I already plan to hit Zumba class on Friday morning and we have an extended Tai Chi class on Saturday.

You know, if I never give myself permission to temporarily go off the rails it will feel like my life is one never ending diet.

I’ve enjoyed every bite and taste, amid the warm love and camaraderie of my family and friends. I’ll be happy to once more eat to my food plan.

I’m okay and life is good.

Local kids go back to school beginning next Monday.   When I was young, I viewed this time of year with equal parts excitement and dread.  Maybe equal parts of excitement, stress and dread.  Growing up in a small town, everybody pretty much knew everybody else.  Unfortunately, familiarity didn’t always breed niceness.  Small towns or big, there are the cliques of the cool kids.  Mostly I remember there being two groups — the ins and the outs, I’ll call them.  If you were even on the fringe, you were definitely out.

Even if you’re sort of in with the in crowd and not ostracized, that doesn’t mean you won’t be teased if you’re a fat kid.  Sticks and stones can break your bones, but you know what?  Names do hurt.  That’s just on the school yard.  I can’t fathom how horrible it would have been to have experienced name calling and teasing for my weight in person and then on the broader, even more enduring public forum of a Facebook.

I think about this when I think about kids going back to school.  I hope that there is broader acceptance today and that kids aren’t so quick to pigeonhole or categorize someone “on the fringe” as undesirable.  Unfortunately, it’s not an entirely optimistic hope.  There are too many stories of kids bullied so badly that it rips them apart and pushes them to suicide.

Back in the day, I’d feel so bad after being teased that it would only motivate me to eat something to suppress the bad feelings.  I wish that I could have done something positive with the meanness, like use it as motivation to lose weight.  Sadly, my compulsion didn’t work that way.

If I took anything positive away from being teased as a kid, I guess it contributed to my self-reliance.  I think I also developed a strong sense of loyalty to the people who were my friends back then.   Wow, I just had a flashback to fifth grade, the year that my family and I lived in France.  There were a couple of real beyotches in my class.  They were also overweight girls.  I sense that they were grateful when I, the “new girl” arrived in school because it gave them someone that they could pick on.   I’d come home so many days and complain to my parents about those two girls.  My folks always counseled me to “rise above it” and be the better person.

I did that for months.  Then in the winter, my closest friend in France and I were on a ski trip with our fellow students.  In a cruel twist of fate, we were assigned to share a room with my arch enemies.  My friend was very shy and this was her first time away from home.  That first night she was homesick and weepy and the evil duo picked on her unmercifully.  They were so incredibly mean that they really made my friend cry.  I asked them to stop.  Then I warned them to stop.  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I snapped.  The one girl and I got into a fight in which I picked up my wooden hairbrush and began smacking her with it.  Pretty quickly she lost her bully attitude and started to cry.  At that point I stopped hitting her, said something snarky like, “Getting hurt until you cry doesn’t feel so great, does it?” and walked away.

I’m not sure why they didn’t immediately run to the chaperones and rat me out, but they didn’t.  Instead, they pretty much steered clear for the rest of the trip which suited my friend and me just fine.

Yes, I know that violence, even if it’s done with a hairbrush and not a deadly weapon, is not the answer.  Rising above it and walking away, like my parents suggested, probably did serve me better in the long run.  Whatever the case, I obviously survived the school bullying I experienced through the years.  That’s something.

I don’t how many of you who come here are age 50 or older, but if you are, there’s an interesting article in the latest AARP Magazine about eating disorders and how they affect a significant number of women over 50.  It offers fairly basic information, or maybe it just seems basic to me because I’ve lived with one for so long, but there are a lot more things in it that make it a useful read for women of any age whether we know a little or a lot about eating disorders.  One thing that I never thought of is that some women who didn’t have eating disorders when they were younger can develop eating disorders when they’re older.

There’s also been a study done that found that 13 percent of American women age 50 or older experience symptoms of an eating disorder.  60 percent of the women in the study reported that concerns about their weight and shape negatively affect their lives.  70 percent were currently trying to lose weight.  There also might be a connection between menopause and the development of new eating disorders or the reemergence of old ones.

The article poses five questions and says that if you answer yes to two or more, you should speak with your doctor to see if you might have an eating disorder.  Given that there are a number of different eating disorders, it must have been hard to identify five questions that could indicate signs.  Here they are:

1. Do you make yourself vomit because you feel uncomfortably full?
2. Do you worry you have lost control over how much you eat?
3. Have you lost more than 14 pounds in a three-month period?
4. Do you believe yourself to be fat when others think you are too thin?
5. Would you say that thinking about food dominates your life?

For the record, if I’d been asked these questions 25 or so years ago, I would have answered yes to 2, 3 and 5.  I think 3 indicates a sign of possible anorexia.  I was never anorexic, but because I would crash diet, losing 14 pounds in two months wasn’t out of the question.

Overall, I’m really glad that this article appeared.  I think there are probably a lot more women who have some degree of an eating disorder but don’t realize it.   Reading this article and processing the information may provide some light bulb moments.  Understanding and exploring an eating disorder can relieve a lot of shame, embarrassment, self-loathing, and general all around crappy self-esteem.  For me, discovering that I had an eating disorder meant that I really wasn’t just a weak-willed, gorging pig with no self-control.  Emotional balance is vitally important in order to achieve any long term success.