Breaking the 'Pound' Barrier

Today, June 30^, 2010, I stepped on my nemesis (aka the scale) and was surprised to read 275.2. I looked at it, studied it and thought, “There’s something different about those numbers.” My mind pondered, “5, 5, 5,” “Yes, it is the FIVE that it different! It says ‘275.2.’” Could it be true?! Am I actually seeing a 5 where just yesterday I read an 8?!! So being a person of great faith, I stepped on the scale 10 more times. And yes, it read 275.2--275.4--275.2--275.4--275.4--275.2 ad nauseum. And so I wondered, “Have I really done it? Have I lost FIFTY POUNDS?” I mean do I need to be at 275.0 to qualify? It was at that point when I realized, “I would have been happy with 275.9! Just to see that number 5!” And so I am taking the honor, glory, fame, and admiration! I have lost 50 big ones! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!! And despite the numbers going down, it has been a very UPHILL battle! But for the first time in a long time, I feel hope. I feel like I have been having a stare-down with my body and the body blinked! Sure, tomorrow I will weigh 276 or 277, but for one brief shining moment I was 275! Yeah!

Naturally, I am not going to be content with 275, I want MORE, MORE, MORE! I want 250!!! I want to be closer to 200 than 300! I want 225, a number I haven’t seen since 1991! And, of course, my Christmas present to myself is to weigh less than 200! Naturally, I expect disappointment, but it’s not going to stop me from being hopeful. My lap-band has truly given me that—HOPE! In previous attempts, my discouragement and despondency was so profound, I would literally throw my arms up in the air and grab anything to put in my mouth and show my body was who “boss”—It was! And so I binged and gained more weight. But now with the lap-band, I go through the same motion, but I can’t binge. It won’t let me and by the time I have calmed down, I thank the lap-band for giving me restraint and trudge on to figure out what I need to do next.

I am in the process of trying to find the perfect solution to my body, I am playing “mind games.” Is it the protein? Is it the grains? The vegetables? The fruits? The Lemonade Fast? The order, portion or proportion of food? Is it the mind, is it the body? What really keeps a body from letting go? What is a “set” level or “set point”? I’m still trying to find that “philosopher’s stone” that will turn fat into muscle and flabby into lean. It is the quest for the fountain of youth or the holy grail; to find that one great truth that makes everything fit, including a size 6!

But for today, I just went Mach 10! And I broke the pound barrier!

White Sugar--The Real Culprit

Years ago before I was married, I read William Duffy’s book, Sugar Blues. It was such an extraordinary book and it scared me so much that I didn’t eat sugar for almost a year. I still remember the opening story about Gloria Swanson “hissing,” “That stuff is poison, I won’t have it in my house, let alone my body.”

Several years later when I felt inherently that sugar was bad for me, and wanted another fix to get me off the stuff, I reread it, but it didn’t make half the impression as when I read it the first time. I thought of the famous quote by Alexander Pope:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Intellectually, I knew sugar was not good for me, but I had become inured to its evils. I felt I would be a fanatic to drop white sugar from my life—I mean everyone eats it! Sugar is in everything! And so even though I wished, wanted, and yearned for a beautifully thin body, I wasn’t willing to give up any of my habits. I felt I could overeat with impunity, gobble up white bread and ice cream and somehow it would all work out. I felt a c-pap machine was the ticket, and then the lap-band was the answer, but they were all pieces to the puzzle. I counted calories and felt if I just ate fewer calories then things would come together and I would lose weight. But last week after visiting with the family of my daughter Stephanie’s former companion, Ashly Gross, I started to rethink. As they say, two crop failures and an imminent drought got the Smith family to move to Palmyra, a convert usually has ten to twenty contacts with the church before really listening to the gospel, and me, well, I looked at Ashly’s mom, Lori, and I thought, “Marilyn, you are either serious about losing weight or you aren’t.” Lori hadn’t eaten white sugar since 1996 and she looked fantastic. She wasn’t always that way, but her husband introduced her to eating well and she went from there. After our talk and visit, I thought, “Marilyn, you have always known sugar was bad for you.” As Lori said, ‘Sugar is just one step away from alcohol. It is an addiction.’” And so I decided to do an experiment. I would go for one day without eating anything with white sugar. That meant NO yogurt, NO skinny cow ice cream, NO chocolate covered acai-blueberries, nothing! Basically, I had an omelet, cottage cheese and pineapple, chicken and vegetables. I wasn’t giving up the fat and salt (the other two addictions that Rob often mentions as the triumvirate of what food manufacturers lace their products to win American appetites—sugar, fat and salt) just sugar.

You can imagine my surprise when after the first day, I lost two pounds and then Saturday night, another two pounds, so that today, Monday, June 21, 2010, I hit an all-time low for my weight since my lap-band, 276.0, I am one pound away from having lost 50 pounds! That is amazing! It’s a wonderful event because whenever I get within sniffing distance of 50, I hit the wall and now I believe I have found the “culprit.” Sugar! White, granulated, C&H sugar! I didn’t want to believe it and the question now will be, how long can I stay “on the wagon?”

Surprisingly, it has been easier than I thought. Before I would start craving things and then sampling things to figure out what it is I wanted. But now my grazing is pretty limited, in fact, what used to be “grazing” is now breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t have that same rapacious thirst. And I definitely do not have the “stomach” to “stomach” it anymore.

My Gold’s Gym buddy, Laurie, tells me that whenever she goes on vacation, she eliminates sugar from her diet because she can’t exercise and invariably, upon her return she weighs less. When I was on my mission, I did Atkins, which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, but I lost a lot of weight, and one of the premises is that you can’t eat sugar. I believe my body is allergic to sugar and when I eat it, instead of getting rashes or anaphylactic shock, I get fat. Some people can smoke and live to 100; others can drink without serious consequences, and others can eat sugar and it not be a problem, but I can’t. Just as a celiac has to avoid gluten like the plague, it is now evident to me that sugar is my nemesis. I once asked my friend who had hypoglycemia how he could forgo the donuts, brownies and other treats, and his response was, “The consequences are worse than the enjoyment.”

Life is a series of delayed gratification. Like the “Marshmallow Experiment” those children who could not wait to eat the marshmallow struggled later in life and had more behavioral problems, while those who waited tended to be more positive and better motivated, have higher grades and incomes, and have healthier relationships. Those children who were told the marshmallows were “yummy and chewy,” broke down in five minutes. But if they coolly thought of the marshmallows as “white puffy clouds” they could wait an average of thirteen minutes. Some children could wait almost eighteen minutes simply by pretending that the treat before them was a picture. In contrast a preschooler shown only a picture of a reward but asked to imagine that it was real lasted less than six minutes. Imagining the treat in all its proximate glory triggers an emotional response, while thinking about the reward in cool, distancing contemplative terms makes waiting easier.” (See Distracted, page 229)

So in order to overcome an addiction, I have to distance myself from the “drug.” I have to be cool and detached and look forward to the ultimate reward. A great tool has been the lap-band because it has given me the ability to think, think in a detached, calm manner. My object now is to strip away the glamour of chocolate and ice cream and calmly see them as the “vice,” the monster, the addiction that has controlled my life for lo, these many years. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and for me this is Day 6 of no sugar! I’ll just have to keep on walking.

How Many Times Do You Chew?

How many times do you chew your food before you swallow? This is a quiz! So leave a comment and let me know.

Chewing has never been my prime interest in “dining.” The object has been to get the food in the mouth and down the gullet as fast as possible, because somehow there was a belief growing up that if I didn’t eat it first someone else would get it and the goal was to eat something as fast and as much as I could so that someone else didn’t eat that last piece of pie or that last scoop of sherbet. However, since my lap-band I have discovered the new world of chewing. I chew approximately 28 times a bite. I have to chew it a lot because if I don’t, it will come back to haunt me! So when I am thinking—and that is the prime directive—I actually have to be thinking about my food, not mindlessly shoveling it in—about my eating and actually concentrating on what is the best thing I can do, it boils down to chewing. If I masticate something until it is basically liquid, it will flow nicely through my alimentary canal. However, if I forget about eating and just revert back to “the get it before it’s gone” mentality, then my lapband lets me know in its own charming way, that I made a BIG mistake! That “wake-up call” has really helped. It hasn’t lessened my desire to eat everything, but it has forced me to actually think about what I really, really, really want to eat.

In talking to my friend, Margy Rockenbeck, at the pool she told me about a book by Leonard Pearson, The Psychologist's Eat-Anything Diet, in which her friend, Dr. Pearson, who is a thin person, made a study of how people eat and the difference between thin and fat eaters. One of the things Margy said was, “Thin people are pretty discriminatory about their eating.” They can discriminate between their body asking for water or food, for sleep or exercise, between something sweet or something sour. They actually listen and can translate their bodies’ internal messages. Meaning that when their body says, “I want ice cream! Their bodies actually say, “I want Haagen Dazs’ amaretto almond crunch.” They are better able to understand and translate what their bodies are actually saying. Whereas I am a person where food goes good with anything. I mean, “Am I tired?” I should eat something so that I’ll be energized. “I’m sad.” Hmm, a subway should answer that problem. “I’m thirsty.” I know a good cheesecake that has raspberry drizzle on the top. Food is the be-all and I Ching of any question. Whereas Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail thinksThe Godfather has that spot, I am conditioned to believe that any problem or celebration goes better with food. Not just a discriminating haute cuisine, but a flat-out, fun-filled smorgasboard of delights! The more the merrier.

So yesterday as I was trying to “chug-a-lug” a shrimp salad, I was telling my friend, Elaine, the petite thin woman across the table, that it takes me forever to eat; I have to chew everything 28 times (like I wanted sympathy or something and I wanted her to say, “Oh you poor thing having to masticate for that long, it must be a terrible burden!) Instead she said, “Only 28 times! I chew my food 100 times a bite!” “Really!” I responded! “Yes, I was always the last one out to recess and eventually I just gave up finishing my food.” Now that is the difference between a fat and thin mentality. A fat person would NEVER leave his or her plate partially clad—that plate better be licked clean and totally naked! But Elaine just got up and left the food and went outside to play with her friends. Rob would think that was the better answer to “cafeteria food” but then he is thin whereas I paid “good money” (I think it was 35 cents) for that school lunch and I better eat every last bite. Rashid was sitting on the other side of Elaine and said, “I had to gobble the food down; I didn’t want to miss it. I eat fast.” It is important to know that although Rashid is thin, she is also from India where my mother was always encouraging me to think of the poor starving children in India and somehow my cleaning my plate would give Rashid more food—never figured that out! But I did clean my plate. So there we sat as Elaine chewed her food and told stories of wonder how anyone could eat a piece of steak in 4 or 5 bites. And I’m thinking, “Just a piece of steak, the whole 12 oz. steak could be inhaled in 4 to 5 bites!” So I end where I began—how many times do you chew your food?

Struggles, Stress, and Sabotage

My friend, Barbara, commented during our scrabble match, “You haven’t blogged in awhile.” And I admitted that my life had been under attack from various angles. First, my dishwasher blew up or as Rob puts it, “Someone let the smoke out.” There was a telltale burned scorch mark on the outside of the dishwasher and when he investigated, he discovered the guts of the circuit board had been fried. I can live without an oven, I can live without a cooktop stove, I can even live without a sink, but take away my dishwasher—and them’s fighting words!

So Rob said, “Guess you better do some research and see which dishwasher you would like.” Luckily, just a few weeks before I had been listening to my friend, Lori, sing the praises of her new dishwasher, a Whirlpool Gold GU3600XTVY, so I called her for the make and model. Her praise was so amazing, I immediately searched every store, dealership, and vender, I could find, and guess what, NO ONE HAD ONE! They were all on back order. Rob said, “As long as we are getting a dishwasher, we may as well get an oven to replace ours that goes ballistic every once in a while.” So for the past two months, I have been hunting for the best product and deal around. I called all my friends and asked them about their dishwashers. Rob wanted the same manufacturer so the appliances would look the same, but he was convinced that Whirlpool didn’t make ovens or at least if they did, they weren’t very good. So after calling my friends, copying pages out of consumer reports, and reading customer complaints and praises on the Internet, I passed on the Frigidaire and Kitchen-aid, and bought the Whirlpool Lori suggested at the beginning of my search from Frederick’s Appliance for the best deal--$500 for the dishwasher and $2000 for the oven, but they were both great deals, free delivery and free 2 year warranty.

Unfortunately, the oven was not on back order and so we got immediate delivery and because Rob was opposed to replacing our 24-inch oven with a 24-inch oven—it’s too small for the pans he bought me years ago and wanted to show me that his gift was very thoughtful--he insisted on getting at least a 27-inch built-in double oven. So since the 27- and 30-inch were the same price we went for the 30-inch double oven.

Getting a larger oven necessitated remodeling. Now, I don’t know about you, but somehow I started going through post traumatic stress meltdown when I have to work with Rob on any project but especially a kitchen project! Argh, that’s my home territory! And I knew that Rob would take forever, so how was I going to keep the wheels turning, the meals coming, and the clean-up going when my kitchen was torn up and in chaos? The first weekend, after Rob had taken all the cupboards and cabinets out and crowded them against the sink and cooktop and pushed the refrigerator against the cabinets blocking the entry way into the kitchen and making it impossible to open the fridge door, I said, “Darling, I can still reach the microwave. We can have Lean Cuisine frozen entrees or eat out at Las Margaritas!” When Jackie saw the pictures of our torn up kitchen, she said, “I guess you’re going out to Las Margaritas a lot!” But in truth, we only went out once (to celebrate Jackie’s birthday)—she couldn’t make it, so we celebrated her birthday with her in absentia.

During the time of the kitchen chaos, Alexa’s boyfriend, Brandon, came for a visit and that in itself was stressful, not his visit per se, but the gut feeling that this was an impending train wreck waiting to happen. As I struggled to keep myself calm, pleasant and understanding while my whole body is poised to attack like a mama bear protecting her cub, I realized that stress is not really a good thing when you want to lose weight. In fact, for some stress makes them lose weight, but for me, it is like a natural defense mechanism and the body will store fat forever! And so when I was in sniffing distance of my 50-pound weight loss goal, 1.4 pounds away, I hit the wall and whamo! Gained 5 pounds in 4 days! It has been ten days since that major debacle and I am proud to say I have lost .4 pounds in 10 days! That is the story of my life! I can work and exercise, diet and count calories, lift weights, and swim laps, but when my body says, “You ain’t going nowhere!” Nowhere is where I go!

On Tuesday, June 8th, I went back to see Dr. Clinch (we have a meeting every six weeks wherein he asks me how I’m doing). I explained to him that I hit that plateau of plateaus. I hit this plateau every single time I want to lose weight—WeightWatchers, FitDay.com, doctor-directed diets, whatever---I lose almost 50 pounds, like 2 or 3 pounds away from it and my body stops losing weight. It is the weirdest thing; however in diets past, I have been rabid! All I could think about was how hungry I was. Not literally, but mentally. As I said in my previous blogs, the voice of the siren was overpowering. I had to “jump ship” and run to the fridge and gorge. But now, the sirens are somewhat silenced and although my frustration level is high, I say, “Oh well, it’s a plateau, let’s see who can outwait whom!” The good thing is that lots of people are noticing I look thinner and have been commenting on it, so even though I am frustrated, I have decided that my body is in “tightening mode” and so I just keep on keeping on. The bad thing is that I am not losing weight. Dr. Clinch said, “It’s not the numbers on the scale; don’t focus on that. If you are going down dress sizes and losing inches, that’s what you should be happy about, I mean people don’t notice how much you weigh, but how you look.” (I am thinking, he is missing the power of the scale, I’m sorry, but when one is morbidly obese NUMBERS do matter!) Then I told him that I don’t understand it, I lift weights, work out on the cardio machines, swim laps, and count calories! And Dr. Clinch says, “Oh, well if you are lifting weights, you are gaining muscle and muscle weighs more than fat!” I WANTED TO SLAP HIM!!! I have been lifting weights for 3 years!!! But I didn’t slap him, I only smiled and said, “Yeah, right.”

So my struggling has caused me stress which in turn has made me want to sabotage myself. I think, “Why not treat yourself to a dark chocolate acai blueberry treat?” or “A delicious skinny cow chocolate/vanilla ice cream sandwich.” Albeit these foods are not as death-dealing to my diets, as others have been in the past, but they keep me away from seeing progress. Dr. Clinch told me to aim for 1000-1200 calories, and I’m thinking, “I carry around an extra 150 pounds, shouldn’t that count for something?” I mean when I was going to Weight Watchers the more you weighed the more points they allowed you because you were exercising every minute you stood up or walked. And then when you lost weight, you had to cut back on the number of points you could eat. So if I cut back from 1500 to 1200, does that mean when I have only 30 pounds to lose, I’ll be eating 400 calories?

At this point, I try to get an eternal perspective and come up with some great eternal truth. The fact of the matter is that sometimes despite our best efforts, things don’t work out the way we want them to or the way we have planned and that somehow even with the monkey wrench jammed into the machine, there is still something that defies our understanding. We feel like we should be able to make some sense out of the problem, but instead it makes no sense. That is how I feel. Why do I need to struggle to reach this goal? Why couldn’t I just eat less, exercise and lose weight on a consistent basis. Why do pounds stop dropping and things look like I am failing? The reason is that I need to look outside myself. Stop stressing. Forget myself, keep struggling and working out and keep at it. Persistence is the final push. It is enduring well, despite the discouragement and depression. It is overcoming the obstacles and still smiling. Losing weight has never been easy and being on a plateau is definitely the pits, but for now, it’s slow and steady wins the race despite how slowly the tortoise crawls, he eventually will cross the finish line as long as he keeps on going. I am discouraged, but not despondent; I am depressed, but not demoralized, I am disheartened, but I still have hope and that is finally the ultimate gift—HOPE! I hope you all keep on struggling, because in the end, the joy of the journey is in the doing!