Reflections on Obesity and Diets

 

FAT Isn’t the Problem!

OK. I’ll admit it. I’ve been heavy most of my life. It wasn’t too bad but the fat-shaming got to me, and I tried diets. My first diet, I was about 13. Mom took me to a weight clinic in Los Angeles.

The last time my aunt fat-shamed me, I about fell apart. I know that was more about her conditional love for me, but it still hurt a lot. I got hold of a doctor and spent about $1700 over the course of 3 months and only lost 14 pounds. That was January.

The Set-Up

Little did we know that mom being broke, feeding us potatoes, chesse and fried chicken, were the biggest problems I would have in my life. True, I’m an addictive personality, too but that is a topic for another day.

As I build the day-to-day habits needed for the Keto Lifestyle, I’m reflecting on how I got here and how my body chemistry was trained to eat the carbs. I was also reflecting on the genetic component. My mom was anorexic. She didn’t eat a lot while I was growing up. I think some of it was her thyroid, and some of it was money. When my sister and I were young, there wasn’t a lot of money for groceries.

She always made sure we had food to eat. Maybe it wasn’t “good” food, but it filled us up. Noodles and a thick soup base with hamburger, scalloped potatoes and ham, stuff like that. And sometimes, it was just the potatoes. Later on, she would get pre-cooked fried chicken delivered hot and ready to eat, “Don’t Cook Tonight, Call Chicken Delight!” and such.

Mom wasn’t a great cook. I had to learn to cook because she often burned stuff. It was kind of sad.

Genetics:

On the genetic side, mom’s sister had T2D, and was heavy. Dad was a little chunky around the middle till his last year, but his heart was his main issue. In the end, it failed him. Mom also smoked cigarettes for about 50 years, so she didn’t die of any metabolic dysfunction.

Diets Don’t Work!

However, I ended up unable to actually reduce my weight significantly and keep it off for any amount of time.  No matter what I did, I just got worse. If you’ve seen the video in the last blog post, you will see the results. I quit “dieting” a few years ago when I realized that nothing was helping, and everything was making things worse.

On top of the failures, there was the “food fixation” or “obsession” I would have every time I tried a diet. And yeah, that’s kicked in a little bit here, too, but the biggest tool is tracking, and that’s all I’m doing – besides restricting carbs. There are no special potions or pills or other stuff to buy. The food is prepared like I would normally make it, except leaving off the carb component. And I’m not hungry.

So, getting back to the body training and the set-up for fatness and obesity….

By eating all the carbs and starches when I was younger, my body learned to process carbs for glucose and store the excess. And of course, there was excess! I ate to cover up a million feelings about myself and my life. I covered-up my feelings and numbed-out when I got too stressed or too emotional by opening a bag of chips or indulging in some ice cream.

Paradigm Shift

Today, I don’t get to do that. I don’t get to numb-out my feelings. I get to feel them, to live them, to revel in them. Good or bad, makes no difference. I’m alive and deserve the full range of emotions and life that I’m given for as long as I live. So, no more hiding. It’s been a long time getting here, but it’s important that I finally did – for myself.

All the times I checked out, I used those “comfort foods” from my childhood, cooked a little better than my mom could cook them, so I would feel better emotionally. That’s a typical over-eaters journey and tale. Where it gets interesting is that the carbs I was stuffing in my mouth were making things worse. Today, I can see that and pass on the carbs.

Conclusions

I don’t blame my mom for giving me the wrong food. She followed the dietary guidelines put out by the USDA. I won’t talk about my sister’s battles with weight because those are her stories and her battles, not mine. I can only share my story. And that’s what I’m putting out here.

I guess I’ll have to edit my Syndrome-X Diet Book…. Looks like I have a new approach. Who knows? Maybe it will sell more copies after the edit.