Good food = good feelings? Who knew!

Although this is obvious this article speaks a lot for my life:

Eat Your Way To Happiness | The Age

I suffer from chronic anxiety and recently it has severely disrupted my life. As in I had to resign from my last job in January because I couldn’t function on a basic level. I’m still in healing, a lot of deep healing. I’m very much in my comfort zone right now, staying in the house and working through things day by day. This is where the meditation is coming in too, that is hugely important.

Anyway, I just thought although the article doesn’t shed anything new or even remotely revolutionary that it was a nice… reminder. Had I been gouging on sugar, though, and binging- I would have hated this article.

Unreliable sources.

Weigh in: +-

Meditation: 20 minutes.

No results today due to the fact the scales are definitely untrust worthy today. I think it’s because the HM picked them up and moved them somewhere else. Y U NO WORK FOR MEEEE?

So anyway, I could be anything between +1.5 kg to -.5 kg. Considering how late I had dinner last night I don’t know. But I’m keeping on keeping on. The meditation is really settling me down into this, helping a lot. Helps with the cravings and just generally helps me live life.

Got to bed at 5am this morning- whoops! The book was too good, what can I say? Sometimes you just have to finish it.

The next book I’m going to read is the Memory of Running- Ron McLarty.

 

But as it’s in Audio book form I’m going to go for a walk and start listening to it. Well it’s a blisteringly blue day so I suppose I should be grateful I’m not stuck under a Dome and go and enjoy it.

 

Until next time…

From the neck up.

Yesterday Mike and I were talking about eating.

 

I coined it as “wanting to eat from the neck up” (or something like that).

 

I think that’s pretty accurate. Everything from my neck up wants the food. Mouth, tongue, teeth, saliva, nose, mind. Neck down I’m okay. I may be hungry but I know when to stop and when to eat.

Something to ponder.

Nike Men vs Women run ad

For all your runners. Love this ad. Gets me going! + Gnarls Barkley is a God pairing.

Withings Wifi Scale

I want this.

I want this bad.

 

Enter the Withings WiFi scale! This gorgeous hunk of glass and aluminum weighs you in kilograms, pounds, or stone with an accuracy of 100 grams. Also, through biometric impedance analysis, the scale accurately measures your body fat. This is all well and good, but what makes this scale so gosh-darned special? WiFi! By giving your scale access to the interwebs, it posts your every weight measurement sample to your own private custom webpage that tracks your body mass and shows you your progress. View your results in tabular or graph form, even on your iPhone using the included iPhone app!

 

Click here for more….

Top 10 about where I’m at.

I have a distorted perception of my surgery. Every person I’ve talked to says take it easy, be gentle, be careful.

And I am still in pain every now and then, definitely. Nothing major but it is still there. And my body sometimes just gets fatigued a lot.

But when people say “I can’t believe you did the 5k on Sunday and you just had surgery!” Two weeks ago today I had it, and even though I register in my head that two weeks really isn’t much when you’re healing from something like this I don’t feel like I’m still in the danger zone. I might very well be, but mentally I sort of brush it away. This could be both beneficial and negative for me. It means I’m getting my body active and healthy, which further promotes good health and healing inside. But also means that if I push it too much it can be damaging. So I think today I just have to take it easy.

As SouthBeachSteve posted, and I think it’s about time!

 

The top 10 best things (or the 10 things that come to mind straight away) about being where I’m at after losing 26.5kgs.

 

1. I feel good when I walk. I feel good in my body, I feel confident, I move easily, I feel attractive.

2. I look at myself in the mirror, or in photos, and I like what I see. This is a biggy. I never thought it was such a big one until I got to a point in my weight when I took photos of myself and I hated myself in all of them, even the ones just of my face. It wasn’t like that for me until then and it is now something I absolutely cherish.

3. Of course, fitting into clothes. Fitting into these clothes I’ve had for a long while and expanded out of. Clothes that I have had for about three years back in St Kilda and I felt great then and now I get to wear them again.

4. Recognizing that I am at a weight that I was at three years ago when I was in the best health (that has now been clocked by where I’m at currently). So from here on in it’s constantly new PB’s.

5. Eating foods and enjoying them three times as much because my tastebuds are so sensitive after not bombarding them with sugar and other artificial and processed foods. Meat and veggies are a whole new awesome world.

6. I am enjoying warm weather and sunny days more. I want to be out in them, instead of hidden because I can’t wear a skirt comfortably, or at all, or any dresses.

7. I feel energetic. I don’t need my afternoon siestas because I just don’t get tired. I want to be out there moving around. And the more I’m out there the more I want it.

8. I am achieving goals I never thought I could achieve. And that in turn gives a ripple effect to other goals in my life.

9. My emotional swings don’t happen so ferociously. I am a much happier person in general. When I get low I know they’re temporary and I don’t feel like they’re the be all and end all. And when the lows hit they aren’t as low as they weren’t before. Not nearly!

10. I live more in the now, in a time and place where I appreciate and am grateful for everything around me. I achieve- what I consider as- my higher self. I’m a big believer in personal growth, in spirituality, and getting in touch with that centre, that source (whether you consider it God, The Universe, Buddha, etc) is what this is all about. Getting to my higher self in a state of now, of connection and of clarity.

Don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back.

I’ve suddenly had a burst of traffic on this site, I expect from the Hot 100. Hellloooo to all the new voyeurs! I have added you to my bloggerreader and I’ll do my best to keep reading. I really love reading what other people go through, their experiences both good and bad. I really can sympathize and understand the struggles and achievements.

Ok so since I found out about my gallstones, although I’ve got back into my exercising routine my eating has not been as slimlined as I’d like. I have now officially finished 3 months on Optifast, and the Hot 100 is my next goal system. But sometimes it feels too much. So much going on, so many goals. So my first, highest priority, goal is my vegetarian eating. Everything else sort of follows on from there.

Let me share with you an advertisement I saw on the net. You see these ones everywhere but this one was… astounding. In all its glory. Can you please explain to me why they have used a pregnant woman as an example of the overweight woman in this? You would think that they’d be a bit smarter than that, but considering how cheap and tactless these adds are in general I shouldn’t be surprised. But I really feel like I ought to email someone and say “Ummm… I’m not sure the woman on the left should lose any weight if she wants to keep the baby??”

In response.

Off to school today. I get anxious about it, after not being there for a while. Like I’m somehow outcast, or I’m so way behind etc. I’m actually getting everything done, and hopefully after my meeting at school tomorrow night I’ll get a bit of an extension since the last week I was out with the flu.

I received a response to my last post, from my friend Andrew, who felt that- from his own personal journey- he disagreed with how I felt about being fat. At first I got really angry. I always seem to, it’s just that type of issue. No matter how much you try and be flippant about it and pretend it doesn’t matter it surely does. I went through the same old, “why he doesn’t understand, how could he, even though he’s lost weight he doesn’t know how I feel, why don’t these people see?” etc etc etc. I get this reaction everytime I hear some sort of negativity about fat people.

One of my biggest learning curves at the moment, with everything I’m going through, is actually forcing myself to sit back and to consider what someone else is saying. The reason I’m doing this is because I realised that in the past someone left a comment on my blog- and I immediately got angry and I forced myself to think “What if Mike had said that to me?” What if instead my boyfriend had said it to me? Suddenly I felt this weight lift off my shoulders and I reconsidered what was being said and I actually listened. So I’m really aware that this reaction I have is quick, short, and now that I’m seeing it for what it is hopefully temporary.

So I thought about it some more and this is what I came up with, whether it’s right or wrong I don’t know but it’s just thoughts.

I would hate to think that any way that I was would make me feel like I was less of a person. I don’t feel like there is anything in my life that has the right to make me feel less than I am. This is both for internal and external influences. So that includes people in society, and that includes the fat on my body. If someone chooses to assume that I am weak, have no control, or am just lazy because of the way I look that’s their business but they have no right to assume that I ‘not good enough’ or ‘not normal’ because I have more fat on my body than the regular society dictates I should have. This also means for myself, not giving in and letting negative and depressing thoughts get me down. It doesn’t matter how I look, I deserve the same respect and love and opportunities as anyone else.

I did notice in Andrew’s response that he said, did it make him unhealthier- this point I have no doubt of. Where I am at now is not as healthy as where I could be when I shed 70 kgs. It doesn’t mean I’m not healthy now, but I will be healthier down the track. This I agree on.

Being a fat person resulting from weak character- this one can be argued for and against in a lot of different ways. My question is- this ‘obesity-epidemic’ taking over the world, 35% of American’s are overweight (or, 1 in 3) – I think in Australia the percentages are larger? Over half? Does this mean that 1 out of 2 people have weak character? Or 1 in 3 people? I find it conflicting that we reflect on fat people as having weak character but then forget that our country, and other countries, are growing larger every year. I think this is because of sooooo many different factors. Media, fast food chains, the cost of a meal, how much time we feel we have to cook every day, how many kids we have to take care of, how much money we earn, what our families eat, how our parents brought us up, what the government wants us to by, how much sugar they put in regular everyday products, etc etc. I don’t think being fat means I’m weak of character. I think I’m an extremely strong person who has grown up with a specific set of mental patterns that has lead to me being this weight. I don’t feel- personally- it has anything to do with me being weak but when you get down to it it was me, at some particular age, taking on a set of beliefs and thoughts, that have continued to repeat themselves over and over again for over twenty years. And in having said that I don’t think, in fact, that a fat person is a weak person but they must have incredible mental and physical strength to overcome a weight problem.

For the last part, just wanting an excuse to not have to lose weight that’s not what the article is about at all. It’s about how being fat seems to be the next step of discrimination, since people feel that they can openly discriminate and taunt fat people and that’s okay. That something ‘must be done’ about us, like sexism, racism, or any other revolution of discrimination that we’ve been through. It’s not about us not doing something about it- because I think that’s incredibly important. I would be all for making real food cheaper and fast food expensive, so that I could buy real food and not feel like I have a hole burning in my pocket. I am 100% for a healthier and happier country- so long as the healthier part is done in such a way that we aren’t just out to shame people for making them feel the way they are, or humiliate them, or put them down or treat them like cattle.

This is something that I could talk about and I know there are a lot of points in here people would disagree with but the beauty of this is that I’m learning to recognize that everyone can have their say, and yep I’ll get angry at first but just give me some time and I’ll do my best to really consider what you’re trying to say.

Health at Every Size.

Health At Every Size.

That’s me. That’s what I’m having.

And so it rises up again.

It’s a testy subject but hey, I have first had experience with it and this is my blog so I’m going to talk more about it. What’s the subject? Fat! Fat, oooh fat. The fat on my thighs, the fat on my ass, the fat on my arms and the fat on my stomach.

I’m brought to this subject today as there was an article in the Sunday Herald Sun magazine Sunday about a woman who is actually completing her doctorate on fat and sexuality in popular culture (that is the shit I’m interested in), and is all for pushing the movement forward for society to finally accept fat people.

Stating from the article, “Wykes (Jackie Wykes) proudly calls herself “fat”- not ‘overweight’, which, she says, implies she should be some other weight, and not ‘obese’, a medical term she finds offensive. “The word ‘fat’ has become a metaphor for ugly, lazy, greedy, smelly,” she explains, “We want to reclaim it as a simple description like ‘tall’ or blond.”

“She adds that the assumption obesity is due to inactivity and overeating is misleadingly simplistic “Some estimates say 20 of people are genetically predisposed to being fat. Then there are other factors, such as stress, medical conditions and medication, which also have a significant effect on weight…. People want to believe that if you have self control you won’t be fat. The idea that you have no control over your weight terrifies them.”

Self control. That’s what fat people are mocked for. Little or no self control. Me looking like this causes others to assume that I have no self control. Just slap me on a treadmill and cut my calories. It actually makes me feel like a lower class of person. And, on the internet where people can express anonymously, a lot of people will encourage that.

Another point in the article which absolutely resonated with me. They quote a Dr Samantha Thomas, of Monash University’s Consumer Health Research Group saying this:

“Thomas says the pervasive idea that obesity reveals a weakness of character is at the heart of anti-fat prejudice. ‘There’s a moral undertone associating being fat with sloth and gluttony.’”

A weakness of character. I couldn’t have possibly put it better myself. Being this way means there is something wrong with who I am, I am incapable as a person. I, like Jackie Wykes, have- what I believe- defied the traditional representation of a fat person. I learned this when I completed my Certificate 3 in fitness. I was stronger, more flexible, and had more stamina than some people in the class. My cholesterol, blood pressure, and physical capacity is in excellent shape. I would say at the end of the day that I’m healthier than a lot of thinner people. That’s what gets me.

That because of my weight people assume things about me, but look at a thinner person and immediately they think they are healthier than me even if they smoke, do drugs, drink alcohol, run on little sleep, suffer from any illnesses or diseases, don’t exercise, and eat a whole lot of junk every day.

My weight does not make me less of a person. My weight does not mean there is something wrong with me. My weight does not mean I’m unhealthy, or unfit. That’s it.