May 3, 2003

• That would explain these baggy pants.

  I hesitated briefly before telling on myself here, but this is the
  sort of thing I would put in my journal if it was private.  I
  pledged to myself when I started this that I would not let the public
  nature of this diary influence me to be less than honest here.  It
  does, however sometimes necessitate a little explanation, some
  background to make the story make sense.  I know I tend to be
  verbose.  So sue me… or just scroll down for the punch line if
  you want to miss all the amusing set-up.

  After a serious health crisis in my early thirties, triggered by my
  internist’s irresponsible prescription-writing, I quit going to doctors
  and started reading up on self-healing.  From Adele Davis’s books,
  I learned that the frequent headaches and nausea I had, as well as
  my hay fever and other allergy symptoms, were related to
  hypoglycemia:  low blood sugar.

  It became apparent that I had brought that situation on myself
  through fasting and dieting to lose weight, and it had been aggravated
  by a few periods of malnutrition and near-starvation that were really
  no fault of mine, but only of poverty.  I resolved to eat right
  and get fit.  At that time, I wasn’t aware of all my food
  allergies and sensitivities, but I did my best with the information I
  had.

  I cut out refined carbohydrates, switched to whole grains, complex
  carbs.  I learned to eat small meals frequently and to eat before
  my blood sugar dropped far enough to trigger hunger sensations. 
  Until then, ever since my pre-teen pudgy years, I had looked upon
  hunger pangs as a sign I was going to get skinny and pretty. 
  Strangely, those times when I did get skinny, such as my summer of
  speed, my friends didn’t tell me I was pretty.  They said I looked
  awful, like “walking death.”  Go figure.

  Over the years, between the fasts, diets, workout videos, bicycle
  tours, hiking trips, life-threatening illnesses, vigorous young
  lovers, and appetite-suppressing drugs, I must have worked off,
  burned off and starved off a ton or so.  Of course, it kept
  coming back again.  I grew accustomed to that pattern.  I
  kept two wardrobes, my fat clothes and my skinny clothes.  All
  that changed when I gave up trying to lose weight and started working
  on gaining health.

  My size after that rose gradually, with a few seasonal ups and
  downs related to my activity levels.  Most of the time I didn’t
  monitor my weight at all.  Gestational diabetes in my pregnancy
  with Doug shot my weight up to 200 lbs. for the first time in my
  life.  I just got bigger clothes and wore a lot of loose floaty
  things to conceal those curves where curves “don’t belong” (by the
  rules of fashion).

  The summer during the eighties when I quit smoking marijuana by
  drinking a glass of water every time I had the urge for a smoke, I lost
  about fifty pounds as I worked in my yard with pick and shovel digging
  deep intensive garden beds.  Some of that came back with
  inactivity the following winter.  I got fairly fit, but stayed
  fat.  It wasn’t much of a problem for me until the end of the
  ‘nineties.

  Winter Solstice, ’98, my first year here in this bigger place, I
  decided to throw a party, a Solstice Feast, as I had been accustomed to
  doing before moving into my tiny trailer at the old place across the
  highway.  I sent out about 55 invitations to friends as far as 100
  miles away.  My feasts had been famous, and I got some
  enthusiastic responses.  I posted a few invitations on
  neighborhood bulletin boards and told everyone to bring their
  families.  It was to be a weekend open house.  I baked a big
  ham and roasted a huge turkey with sage and celery stuffing made
  with both wheat bread and cornbread.  To go with it, I did candied
  yams, mashed potatoes and gravy, green salad, fruit salad and a bunch
  of other “trimmings”.

  In addition, I did a complete Tex-Mex (my specialty) feast of
  no-bean chili, cheese enchiladas, vegetarian wheat-and-soy
  tamale pies, spicy rice and frijoles refritos.  Something
  for everyone.   The day and night leading into the
  feast, I baked.  If memory serves, there were two pecan pies, two
  apple pies, two cherry pies, and one each of lemon meringue and
  chocolate cream.  I made two big cheesecakes and several fruit
  toppings for them.  I baked a three-layer German chocolate cake, a
  spicy carrot cake with cream cheese icing, and a white cake with lemon
  filling.  I’d invited a lot of people, and didn’t want anyone
  going hungry.

  Friday night, the night before my feast, unbeknownst to me–the
  non-drinker whom my neighbors know better than to invite to their
  parties–there was a big drunken Christmas party.  The day of
  my feast, most of my little neighborhood here was sick and hung
  over, revulsed at the very thought of food.  Several kids in the
  big family of some of our best sober friends had misbehaved and as
  their punishment, the family didn’t get to come to my feast.  The
  temperature dropped overnight to about forty below zero and some of my
  Anchorage friends phoned with regrets.  Cars wouldn’t start, or
  heaters were malfunctioning… short version:  five people showed
  up.

  I sent each of them home with a whole pie and a lot of other food,
  but I still had a lot of leftovers to clean up.  My thrifty Scots
  mom, who grew up during the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression,
  programmed me not to waste food.  Instead, I wasted myself. 
  I couldn’t let my kid eat all that sugar by himself, now could I?

  I don’t know how much weight I gained then.  I didn’t have a
  scale at the time.  It was another year before I got one. 
  The autumn following the Winterfeast that didn’t happen, I got some
  mystery infection that exacerbated my auto-immune syndrome, which had
  been in remission almost a decade.  The asthma was so bad that I
  literally got out of breath turning over in bed.  I was about as
  active as your average rutabaga that winter, and only slowly got back
  on my feet the next year.

  When I did get a scale, I weighed a little over 220.  Activity
  and some sporadic attempts to get off the ongoing sugar binge did
  reduce my girth a little bit, but the scales never went below
  220.  I’d gotten the scale in the summer of 2001, after I’d
  identified some of my food allergy/addictions and formulated the first
  version of this diet I’m on now.  I kept to that diet for two
  months, and then after 9-11 and some horrifying shamanic journeys to
  aid victims and their families, I reverted to comfort foods.  I
  started putting on weight again, possibly gaining between 20 and 30
  pounds.  I’m not sure what my top weight was, because I stopped
  using the scales.

  I knew that having less weight to drag around would help the
  breathing and all, but my first priority was healing.  Finally,
  last fall I got the amino acid supplements that relieved my addictive
  food cravings and managed to stay on this diet for six
  months.   One day, after I had noticed that my clothes were
  fitting more loosely, I stepped on the scale.  Just out of the
  shower, without my glasses, I peered down and saw a big “17″ next to a
  “16″, with the needle hovering between them.  I figured I had lost
  at least five or ten pounds.  Over the next few months, I watched
  the indicator go down to between “14″ and “15″.  When my pants got
  really baggy, I dug out some old ones to wear, and they grew looser but
  the scales weren’t showing much difference.

  Yesterday, just out of the shower, I looked in the full length
  mirror and could tell I was quite a bit thinner than I had been. 
  When I stepped on the scale, though, it still was registering
  between ”14″ and “15″.  Thinking, “How can this be?  How
  could I have gone from size 20 down to size 16 (and the 16s are
  getting baggy now), without losing weight?”  I put on my bifocals
  and bent ‘waay over to read the fine print on the dial.  That “15″
  is short for 150.  I have lost over 70 pounds and maybe as much as
  100, in only six months without even trying.  I’ve only ten more
  pounds to go to get to my ideal weight based on height and build. 
  Geez, that was easy.  Bring on the next challenge.

  (UPDATE, 2 years later:  I learned that my bathroom scale
  differs from the more accurate one at the local clinic by something
  between 10 and 20 pounds, and the bathroom scale varies according to
  the room temperature, so my weight at any one time, and the total
  weight loss, can only be approximated.)

  

  • 1:28 pm
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