Help Yourself #1

Finished my first (and second but we'll get to that) self help book of the year. 

This month's choice was some deliberate counterprogramming. Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living by Jes Baker. I felt like it would be a good choice to dive into when the barrage of January BE THIN TO BE HAPPY advertising started. 

I liked a lot of it. I really wished a lot of it had been more prevalent when I was growing up. Which if it had been there probably wouldn't be a need for it now, but still...I can wish. 

It's about not just body positivity and body acceptance and all of those buzzwords that you hear but about loving yourself, and giving yourself permission to love ALL of yourself and all of the wonderful diversity around you. And also how to advocate for yourself and how to not limit yourself and how to push back on people that try to limit you because of your size. 

It was aimed at someone younger and heavier than I am, I think, but it was still good to read and I took things from it. 

Some things I didn't agree with and I had to sit with those things and think about them. Did I not agree because I'm 54 years old and have been steeped in diet culture my entire life or did I not agree because my own research and life experience has taught me differently? And sometimes it was one, sometimes it was the other. 

I reached a point about 5 years ago where I decided to stop struggling with my weight. To just stop. It wasn't doing me any good. It was making me feel badly about myself every day. I mean it's right there, struggle with my weight. I decided that I was the size I was and so I was just going to make sure I was in the best physical shape, best healthy state, I could be in, size be damned. And so I focused on what I was eating, eat real food not processed pseudo foods, and I focused on working out. I can lift heavy things, I can walk quite a few miles, I'm good. 

I went through my closet and got rid of any clothes that didn't fit. All of the things I had been saving for "when I lost the weight" I cleared it all out. Some of you remember that. It was something like 6 bags of clothes to Goodwill. Oh how I wish I hadn't done that...

BUT at the time it was really important to do it. I needed to clear out that feeling of failure every time I looked at that super cute black dress with the multicolored polka dots that I had only worn twice before I got too heavy to fit it. And all of those jeans in various sizes that I couldn't have pulled past my thighs no matter how much I was lifting at the gym. Everything I touched needed to fit. And I need to love it.

No punishment clothes. Because that was a thing I would do when I was at my larger sizes. I wouldn't buy anything nice because clearly I didn't really deserve it. I bought utilitarian things. Things that I didn't really like, thinking it would encourage me to lose weight. But I hadn't lost weight. I had been the same size for a few years. This is what my shape was and I needed to stop punishing myself over it. I wasn't all the way to body positivity, but I was working on body acceptance. 

And then the pandemic hit. And it was a terrible year with personal trauma and societal trauma and so I baked. A lot. And we ate. A lot. And I stopped wearing anything with structure. Soft clothes every day. Which, again, at the time was how we dealt and I think it was fine. But I gained even more weight from where I had been for years and now I was looking at a whole new closet clean out. If I ever stopped wearing soft clothes, which I wasn't sure I would. 

But about a year into the pandemic I tried the food elimination process to see if my joint pain could be caused by what I was eating. Okay, wait, that's not exactly accurate. That's what I told Brent we were trying it for, but really I was trying it to see if it would help him with some acid issues he was having. Our doctor had recommended he try an elimination diet before but he wouldn't do it, too much hassle, didn't want to force me to cook special foods, yada yada yada...So when I read Michael Symon's book Fix it with Food I knew I had an opportunity to see if it would work. We had actually been planning on doing it the year before but then... see the above paragraph... 

So I did the elimination diet and discovered that yeah, food was an issue. I was eating things that were making me feel lousy. (We did not discover what was triggering Brent's issue completely, but did discover that nightshades are no bueno for him) And I lost 25 pounds. (Really wish I had kept those clothes.) 

But I didn't lose 25 pounds because it was a diet. I lost the weight because I wasn't holding on to so much fluid anymore. I lost the weight because of the decrease in inflammation and the accompanying decrease in pain. I was able to work out more because I hurt less. I was smaller because my body stopped trying to protect me from the poison (to me) I was eating daily. 

And that massive weight loss did trigger a small stretch of "oh I should lose more" but I got it nipped in the bud and I have settled out at the same weight (in a range of 5 pounds) for the past two years. This is where I am comfortable. My knees don't complain, my body feels healthy, I can eat intuitively. 

And as I read this book I thought, I wonder if I had been raised with body acceptance if I would have figured out that there are certain foods that make me feel unwell sooner than I did. Instead of believing that all of my health issues were because of my weight, if I had realized that being overweight isn't a health issue unto itself, if I would have figured out how to treat my particular body well earlier. 

Because for years we have all been bombarded with the message that being fat is the problem, instead of looking at weight gain being a symptom of a problem (sometimes) or not having anything to do with the problem (most often). Like take diabetes, we've been told for years that being heavy is a cause of diabetes. Lose the weight, get your blood sugar under control.

But is that right? 

Not really. Being heavy and having diabetes often do go hand in hand but not that being heavy causes diabetes. The same thing that causes diabetes, your body's inability to process or regulate sugar, and the food choices you are making, causes weight gain. It's why you often lose weight AND get your diabetes under control when you change the way you eat. It's not that the weight caused one, it's that the sugar issue caused both. See?

And I sort of knew it. Or was figuring it out much earlier than the recent research has shown. Think about the problems right now with Ozempic. It's a great drug for helping control diabetes. But people are using it for weight loss. Because it changes the way your body processes blood sugar. It helps manage that and a side effect is you aren't hungry. So you lose weight.

When we did Atkins years and year ago it was the same thing. It's a diet that a lot of people have used to get their blood sugar under control and you lose weight. The thinking (when we did it) is that the weight loss is what triggers the good blood sugar. But it's the fact that you aren't hungry that triggers the weight loss. I figured out once how many calories I was taking in a day on Atkins and it was scary low. But I was never hungry because of what I was eating so I didn't worry about it. 

But I didn't quite put it together.

It took years to figure out that my weight and my health weren't really tied together. A change in doctor helped too. Not ending each appointment with "lose weight" was a bigger relief than I ever thought it would be. The only caveat to that is that I do have more knee pain with my arthritis when I'm heavier. Even heavy and fit is more pain than if I'm a little lighter. Which makes sense in a way that a lot of other things don't. A joint that is damaged is going to feel better supporting less weight. It's also why it feels better when I keep up the muscle work around it that helps support the joint. Keep moving to keep moving. 

But anyway, the first self help book of the year was around diet and fitness...except not. It was partly around how the diet and fitness industries have completely warped our understanding of how our own bodies work and how the advertising and glorification of thinner bodies over fatter ones has made us all think that thin is better. As I said, I think the book was definitely aimed at someone younger than I am, and someone larger (in her description of plus vs. straight sizes I am firmly in the straight sizes category, I just have a plus size mentality), but I also believe it would be a good read for just about anyone. 

We all need to learn that all sizes and shapes of people are just that, all sizes and shapes. And apply that to ourselves. I have gorgeous, sexy, stunning and handsome friends of all sizes, I could just never apply the lense I saw them through to my own mirror.

Eat good healthy food. Give your body the best foods it needs to run the best way it can. 
Be active. Get your heart healthy. Give your muscles some work to do. 
And enjoy your body. Every bit of it. Dress in what you like to wear. Get clothes that fit your body and your style and go be fabulous.