I'm stuck.
Figuratively. Literally. Emotionally, even. Stuck.
Can't come up with a good blog topic. Can't get the words out. Can't get the healthy food down very well. Can't get the weight down. Stuck.
Some moments I cleanse the stuck with chocolate but mostly I've been using exercise as catharsis. This is a good thing, I know. But it's not new to me. I've had a few 'stuck' moments in my life where I've turned to compulsive exercise to help me work out the kinks.
The issue, this time, with all my gym rattyness – besides the fact that I turn to Jersey Shore when I'm on the treadmill and find myself nodding in agreement with the occasional Snooki-ism – is that the work outs don't seem to be turning into weight loss. Instead they seem to turn me into a carb-seeking missile which in turn makes me feel bloated, gross and guilty which in turn makes me head back to the gym at full force.
Its a viscious cycle.. Not unlike the “romance” between Sammi “Sweetheart” and Ronnie “Roids”. Frustration, tears, sweaty tight clothing and lots and lots of f-bombs.
I'll be back in touch once I get off this hamster wheel. Right now I gotta GTL.
My apologies, dear readers, for my absence from the blogging community, lately. As you all well know, the business of the holiday season isn't to be taken lightly.
From shopping and wrapping to drinking and puking, well, it doesn't leave much time for personal reflection now, does it? Unless of course that reflection is the one you see of yourself in the rippling water of the toilet at 1am after your friend's annual Christmas party – and then, well that reflection is certainly not worth mentioning, much less commenting on.
In fact, I haven't been doing much of the “this time last year” reflection at all. I've always kind of been a forward thinker. I like to dwell on what COULD happen (good and bad) , rather than on what already happened.
But the other day I was trolling a friends' facebook page, and came across a couple of photos of me that made me so sad:
I'm the big one without a blacked out face
These were taken at my friend Kate's Christmas party last year. I'm sad looking at these photos because I'm probably at my heaviest but what made me get teary-eyed is that I remember thinking I looked SO GOOD that night.
I'd purchased a really adorable silver and gold strapless top from Lane Bryant (because I couldn't find any cute holiday tops to fit me in the regular stores) and wore it with some black pants that had an ELASTIC waist. Let that sink in. ELASTIC WAIST.
Even though I KNEW I was at my heaviest weight ever, I still thought I looked pretty hot. And my sweet husband. My sweet, dear, husband! Well, he TOLD me I looked beautiful. In fact, he he probably even tried to seduce me that night because, well, he is just awesome --- and deprived --- and probably drunk. But anyway, the man knows how to make a hefty girl feel loved.
Then some friends posted this photo the other day and I smiled:
I'm the one who isn't a ghost
Because I look at it and I think I look pretty good. And not too fat. And because when my husband told me I looked beautiful, I believed him. Even if he was drunk.
However, in my very humble opinion, you can't really get a good idea of EXACTLY how I looked at that party a couple of weeks ago so I decided to get dressed up all over again, in my SIZE 14 DRESS THAT I HAVE HAD FOR 7 YEARS and give you a picture you can really worship:
And, even if you are drunk and deprived, you don't need to tell me I look great because, for once, I already know!
I didn't notice this until 5 or 6 years ago when a colleague of mine pointed it out (and mocked me relentlessly) but I routinely use the phrase “Oh, for cryin' out loud!” You know, like, I'm in the check out line at the Piggly Wiggly to buy some milk and Pringles and after waiting 25 minutes for the blue hair in front of me to get out all her coupons and argue with the cashier about whether she can use the .25 cents off Charmin coupon for both bath tissue AND ass wipes or just the tissue and then its finally my turn and the register runs out of ticker tape and the manager has to be called over to replace it because the cashier is a “New Team Member!” and then the manager decides to use this as a 'learning experience' for said “New Team Member!”? That's when I pull out the “Oh for cryin' out loud!”
Now, for those of you who haven't met me or read my profile information, that probably leads you to believe that I am a 75 year old South Jersey grandmother who tells dirty jokes and shakes her fist at bad drivers. Or that I'm Joy Behar.
Unfortunately, you'd have assumed incorrectly. I'm just a dorky 33 year old who complains frequently and loudly enough to SEEM like a 75 year old. By the way, my knees are popping like CRAZY today. Must be a storm coming.
But you see, its not my fault that I say “Oh, for cryin' out loud” or “For Pete's sake!” or “You get married so you have someone to kill the bugs”. I INHERITED these phrases. They're family mottoes! Sometimes we cross-stitch them on pillows.
And maybe its the fact that the holidays are upon us or the fact that my 89 year old grandmother recently came to visit, but lately, I've been thinking a lot about habits and rituals and what I've inherited versus what is 'all me.'
For instance, I bite my fingernails. Yes, it is a nasty habit and probably means I'm a nervous person or need constant oral stimulation (tee hee) or maybe it means I like my nails short. Or that I'm a serial killer.
No one else in my family bites their nails. Not my sister, my mother, my grandmother or my father. They all have lustrous, painted (daddy likes Rockette Red), beautiful nails and have no shame showing their hands to even the most judgmental of Vietnamese manicurists.
Also, I HAVE to sing along to every song that comes on the radio. I simply CANNOT carry on a discussion if there is a song playing in the background that I know the words to (which means there isn't much talking in my car. Unless, of course, we're on the Smooth Jazz station, in which case, we're talking about my impending funeral because I'm about to throw myself out of the moving car). Much of my family is like this. We WILL shush you if you choose to interrupt us during our renditions of any Carpenters' song.
Anyway, while my grandmother and mom were here last week, I took notice of their body types and eating habits. Neither one of them has ever been fat nor have they ever really been skinny. They are both average, pear-shaped, white women who complain mostly about their thighs being a tad jiggly and asking if things "make their butts look big" but in reality, they look like just about every other American woman walking the streets. My sister, lucky girl, inherited that particular shape while I, on the other hand, am a different fruit altogether.
Call it apple, call it top heavy, call it Kathy Bates – I'm basically your average Granny Smith sitting on a couple of Popsicle sticks. Pour some caramel on me and you've got a sought-after State Fair treat. I carry all my extra weight right around my middle, the unhealthiest place to carry extra weight. Also pretty terrible in terms of finding jeans that don't make you look like like one of the Tweedle Dee or Dum twins. This, along with my love for cop show dramas and poop humor, I inherited from my father.
With regard to eating habits, well, I can tell you that I've never ever seen mom or grandma 'binge' on anything other than a sale at T.J.Maxx. Mom's usually on a 'diet' and at any given time you can find a chewy, fake-peanutbuttery, 100 calorie treat at the bottom of her purse. I've seen her turn down homemade cookies with a flip of the hand and claim that she just “can't get enough” of something as mouth-watering as celery sticks with fat free ranch dressing.
Grandma on the other hand, usually drinks ½ a can of regular Coca-Cola at lunch and cooks with Crisco regularly. Although she recently started working out so as to 'watch her figure,' on our recent trip to Starbucks, when our frowny faced barrista asked Grandma if she “wanted whip on her white chocolate mocha” Grandma looked genuinely perplexed when she answered “Well, OF COURSE!”
Although, she, and I, looked equally perplexed when the designer velvet track suit clad soccer mom behind us ordered a “grande half-caf, triple shot, half syrup, gingerbread soy latte”.
See, Grandma simply doesn't see a point in ordering a white chocolate mocha and then butchering it with skim milk and denying herself whipped cream. Why? Because Grandma only gets a Starbucks coffee treat TWICE A YEAR.
Bottom line here people, I inherited the worst of both my mom and grandma's worlds. I basically spent the last 27 years of my life binging on diet food and then turning around and treating myself to more of it for choosing 'wisely' and not eating the skin off of ONE piece of fried chicken.
By the by, Snackwell's Devil's Food low-fat cookies are only low-fat if you eat ONE of them. A box of those cookies will NOT make you thinner.
So, to sum it up, I got fat because of what I inherited and I got fat because of the choices I made. There's really no sure way to know which came first, the fatty or the Olestra.
What I do know, now, is that thanks in a HUGE part to my Lap Band, I'm finally able to take the best and healthiest bits from Grandma's eating habits and Mom's eating habits and come out the other end a thinner, happier and healthier person.
I don't know if I inherited this ability to take control of my life and make it better or if it is something I learned, and it really doesn't matter, I guess. I'm just glad I'm finally able to do it.
Grandma showed me how to make her famous pie crust. LOTS of Crisco
Then she showed me how to make her amazing fried chicken. MORE CRISCO!
I had about 3/4 of a piece, WITH the skin. Just the right amount and YUMMY!
Grandma, Mom and the Little Girl who I hope only inherits the best parts of all of us.
So, I have this friend....
Don't you just LOVE when stories start out that way? In high school such a phrase was often followed by: “who is having sex with her boyfriend and needs to get on birth control but she can't tell her mom and doesn't know where to go to get it” which was then followed by YOUR mom narrowing her eyes at you, getting a little sweaty on the forehead. Which was then followed by you cocking your snotty teenage hip to the side whilst responding “NO! REALLY! Its my FRIEND! Not ME! I SWEAR, MOM!”
Anyway – I have this friend, we'll call her Olive Oil. She's skinny. Really skinny. Always has been, always will be. And she's beautiful. And a whole bunch of other things that are wonderful and lovely and covetous. Like, she never fails to give people the benefit of the doubt. And she doesn't like to gossip. What is UP with that?
You already hate her, don't you?
Here, hate her some more: She once bitched and moaned to me about how she was sad that after birthing two kids she could no longer fit into her size 2 jeans. SIZE TWO. This conversation happened while we were eating our Panera Bread lunches – my salad (dressing on the side!) and her foccacia bread sandwich (extra cheese on the side!) and NON-DIET Coke. She DID get some salad too, that day though. In her lap.
Then I took off my size 20s and wrapped her skinny butt in them and stuck her in the trunk of my car. It was all done with love though.
Anyway, we've known each other for a long time. She's seen me at my heaviest, she's seen me at my skinniest. She's seen me happy with my body and hating my body. What she's never seen me as though, is NOT on a diet.
She's been with me to Walgreens when I was spending my allowance on Metabolife. She's eaten my Everything Bagel after I'd taken off the turkey and cheese while doing Atkins. She's scrunched up her nose at my Slim Fast and tasted a bite or two (and spit them out) of my Jenny Craig turkey and rice soup. She's listened while I've calculated the amount of Weight Watchers points in my chicken fajitas and wondered aloud how I fit in all the exercise I do. After school I'd eat carrot sticks and she'd have McDonalds.
Somehow, amidst all of my dieting and her NOT dieting, I continued to get fatter and she continued to get skinnier. In the abbreviated words of our deteriorating youth: WTF?
So, Olive Oil has been having some issues with feeling dizzy and disoriented and lethargic. She's not yet seen a doctor but she thinks she's has issues with her blood sugar. Her hypothesis was that she had started doing some exercise but had not upped her caloric intake enough to account for the amount of exercise she is doing. Her current solution? Stop exercising.
I suggested EATING MORE, because, well, for a fat girl, that's as instinctual as buying the black one because its most slimming. Elliptical for 30 minutes = a night of eating buttercream frosting out of the can. IT'S MATH PEOPLE.
Then she said something so horrific, so foreign, so unbelievable, I ALMOST put down the miniature Snickers bar I was licking. She said: “BUT SOMETIMES I'M JUST NOT HUNGRY.”
Stop the press! My skinny friend DOESN'T LIKE TO EAT WHEN SHE'S NOT HUNGRY?!
“Are you sure?” I asked? “What about just ½ a cheese stick or maybe a handful of nuts? M&Ms? A Whopper Jr.? I mean, you're skinny, C'MON! Live it up!”
But she insisted. She doesn't like to eat when she's not hungry. Not even a little.
And for the first time in my life, I kinda 'get it'. I'm not totally 'there' yet but thanks to Leona, I'm starting to understand what its like to have a normal relationship with food. I can't say that I don't pop a chocolate or potato chip every now and then, even though I'm full from lunch. And sometimes just seeing that its 6pm makes me hear dinner bells. But they aren't ringing that loudly and sometimes I'm able to shut them out as I would a Michael Bolton song on an elevator.
Every fat girl knows that 'only eating when you are hungry' isn't some giant secret that the skinny girls are keeping from us. We know its common sense. It is just that, for whatever reason, we've been ignoring that instinct for so long that the sense isn't so common.
After 27 years of doing it, eating when you aren't hungry isn't just a bad habit, it's inherent.
They say “you learn something new every day.” What they don't tell you is how hard it is to UNLEARN something you didn't want to know how to do in the first place.
Me & Olive Oil in 1995. She made brownies for our road trip but I couldn't eat them since I was on a diet.
Also, yes, her waist was and is, smaller than my bicep.
Camille's post regarding whether or not to tell her mother about her Lap Band got me thinking about the 'support' that I've received from friends and family since deciding to go forward with the gastric band and the LACK of support that so many of my other banded blogger friends have had with regard to their weight loss surgery (WLS).
I don't have the energy to get all philosophical about it but I wanted to share a quick story that I think pretty much sums up how friends and family SHOULD act regarding a person's decision to have WLS.
Last weekend I, Kate, and some of our other mommy friends went to the mountains for some “relax and recharge” time away from husbands and kids. Hot tub, wine and massage. Need I say more?
Kate and I have been very open with our mommy group about our band surgeries. Partly because we spend so much time together between playgroups, mommy's night outs, birthday parties and family events it would be hard to keep such a secret from them. And partly because honestly, they are all such amazing women and have been supportive in every facet of each other's lives that we felt 'safe' with them.
Well, on the drive up to the mountains, Kate, Shannon and I were all in one car. We were talking about potty training, tantrums and other toddler challenges and kind of out of nowhere Shannon says “I am just so proud of both of you girls and the progress you've made with your weight loss. You both look so good”.
She didn't quantify it with comments about us having had surgery to help us or question whether we'll be able to 'keep it off'. She just did what a friend should do: support us through our journey.
So, not only is Shannon a great friend, she's also a wise woman because damn if we DON'T look good.
See for yourself:
Kate is in the center
In the couple of weeks since I've been gone from the blogosphere I've enjoyed such things as hot tubs, wine, pumpkin patches, girls weekend away, wine, a massage by a hippy mountain man that repeated the phrase “relax and restore” about 37 times in the course of 90 minutes, wine, and of course, vodka.
Yet, each of these events, with great stories accompanying, have taken a back seat in my brain since watching this vlog by the crazy yet inspiring Amy W., and her blog posts that followed.
Typically I prefer to be the star in my blog but such an even as eating an entire hamburger WITH BUN, whilst sporting a Lap-Band, trumps my self-centeredness and it simply must be addressed.
See, I'm feeling a bit like you feel after someone you know has experienced something tragic—like a car accident, or the loss of a loved one or your skirt tucked into the back of your pantyhose: What if it was me?!
I try not to be too judgmental (at least not to anyone's face) and so I'm withholding my judgment for Amy's cardinal banded sin. And it seems like she's received enough spankings from her followers to warrant her a plaque in the S&M hall of fame. Instead I find myself biting my fingernails with worry, furrowing my un-botoxed brow and looking at burgers, bagels and doughnuts in an entirely different with mixture of horror and longing.
See, hearing that my inspiration has successfully gone where no bandster has gone before has done a number on me.
Call me naive but I seriously thought that eating burgers with buns, untoasted loxed and creamed cheesed bagels, Panera's Chicken Caesar Sandwiches were feats that were simply not possible with banded restriction.
Now, if you have followed my banded history you know that it took me F.O.R.E.V.E.R. to get any resemblance of restriction in my band. But once I got some (at about 7 ccs in a 10 cc band) Leona put the “kabash” on just about every food I've mentioned above. She simply stops it in its tracks.
While I recognize that everyone is different and perhaps Amy's ability to conquer this burger-beast is a one-off, I live in fear.
Regardless of how much research we did prior to getting our bands, regardless of how mentally and emotionally ready we were for such step, getting the band did require us to take a leap of faith. The gastric band, in the world of medical procedures, is relatively new. There aren't exactly thousands of well known bandsters who have had their band longer than a few years and are out there sharing their stories.
How do I know I won't tap out my band and be without restriction forever? How do I know that this amazing feeling of fullness and satisfaction that I get now after eating a small amount of food won't disappear someday even with a filled band?
Although each day I am finding new ways to analyze my relationship with food and with feeling/being fat, I haven't conquered it yet. I'm not yet free.
I still NEED MY BAND TO DO ITS JOB.
While I hope that I can be buried with my band, a thin, healthy woman, a part of me also hopes that if for some reason Leona and I had to part ways, I would still be able to maintain a healthy relationship with food and my weight.
I'm using this band as a tool, not as a cure.
My paranoia, however, is that Leona is going to crap out on me before I'm ready to make my way into remission.
Normally, relaxation comes at a price.
In my neck of the woods a pedicure is $35, a evening of cocktails with the girls is $50 and a Swedish massage is $70 (“happy endings” are extra – unless you have a gift certificate).
And six days on a Caribbean island, my 2-year old in the safe, albeit cookie-filled hands of her grandparents wasn't cheap either. We paid off the vacation monetarily but I'm paying a much higher price via sugar withdrawal induced tantrums, 6 a.m. wake-up calls and acoustic bombardment torture in the form of an alien life form known simply as “The Wiggles”.
Seriously, if they'd wanted to get Noriega out a few days sooner, than they should have played Captain Feathersword reciting the Declaration of Independence over and over again instead of the Howard Stern show: “Ahoy there me hearties! We hold these here truths to be self evident. Oooh hoo!”
Side bar: Did you know that the U.S. Military has used NEIL DIAMOND to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay? NEIL DIAMOND?! Who doesn't like “Sweet Caroline”?! That's like saying you feel “tortured” by having to watch puppies and kittens playing with a ball of yarn. No wonder they aren't getting any information out of those guys about where the heck Osama Bin Laden is hiding. Great. I now have to wonder if 'waterboarding' is actually just a day in a jacuzzi.
All these minor annoyances aside, vacation was wonderful. Lots of sleeping, lots of swimming, lots of reading, lots of drinks made with two shots of liquor and names like “Sandals Sunset”, “Orange Bliss”, “No Pressure” and “Knock You On Your Ass So Hard You Have To Take Two Naps In One Day.” I think that last one has tequila in it... and vodka...and rum...and Vicodin.
One thing there was NOT lots of, however, was eating. Our resort was an 'all inclusive' which, translated, means “fat people like it here”. Buffets abound at Sandals' resorts. And when the buffets are closed? No pressure, no problem my brotha! A burger and fries from the seaside bar awaits you!
In the past, just being near all this food, all the time, would have made me eat. I could have finished off lunch and still been signaling my cabana boy to bring me a large order of onion rings with an ice cream sundae on the side.
It was strange being constantly surrounded by food and yet NOT EATING. What was strangely familiar however, was being surrounded by fruity drinks and using the phrase “Sure, I'll have another! Put whipped cream in it this time!” So all in all, balance was achieved.
All this said, pina coladas and strawberry daquiris are sliders so even though I stayed the course with eating, I came home two pounds up due to the alcohol imbibing. Lucky for me Sandals does not have an all-you-can-eat-soft-serve-ice-cream-bar (although I complained loudly to several different resort employees about not being able to 'get my ice cream on') or it would be worse.
But here I am, 4 days post-vacation and those two pounds have disappeared so once again, I'm most thankful to my Lap Band.
Husband and I went on vacation but thank jeebus Leona doesn't take holidays. I hired that bitch to be a workaholic and as expected, she's exceeding expectations.
In a cabana right before my second drink of the day
After my second drink of the day
