Now that I have fully transitioned back onto real food, I am going to recycle this gross shaker.  It is not like I didn’t rinse it after each use and wash it with soap, but the residue from the shakes simply did not come out.   When I used the dishwater, the gunk got baked on.

I

It makes me wonder what the inside of my stomach looks like.  Kind of creepy, but the program worked, so I am not complaining.  I have lost a significant amount of weight and am primed to continue losing until I reach a weight that works for me and keeps me healthier.  The Kaiser recommendation is to continue to use 3 products a day for the rest of my life.  I have decided to ignore that.  Once I finish my last 3 shakes I am done. The shakes are too gross to me at this point and the bars, while handy in a pinch, don’t seem necessary for every day.  Costco also sells protein bars for half the cost of the Optimist products.  Eating every 3 hours or so makes sense to keep hunger at bay, but I think I can do that eating somewhat more natural food.  (Are low-fat mozzarella cheese sticks real food?  They are a handy protein though.  Hummus, fruit, all of those type of choices can work just fine.) I certainly don’t want to discourage others who might make different choices about the products, but this is what feels right to me.

This week I have been pondering how my body feels.  It is smaller.  I have more muscle and less fat.  I am stronger.  My skin even feels smoother.  My ankles are no longer swollen and the lipodermatosclerosis in my legs is way less painful. I can open the solar pool cover all by myself, something that wasn’t possible 2 months ago. I will need to buy some new clothes soon as most of my old ones are way too big.  I actually feel thin.  I am not thin, however, and anyone else, looking at me, would still see me as fat.  But I FEEL thin.  When I last worked for the federal government, there was a lot of talk about reinventing it.  We also talked about “right-sizing” rather than “down-sizing.”  I never understood the differences as we went through round after round of hiring freezes which caused service declines, but the term of “right-sizing” makes some sense in my current situation.  I want to get to a size and a weight that feels healthy.  If I feel good, I don’t really give a damn what other people think.  I am too old and have been through too much in my life to start worrying about other people’s opinions now.  We talked about goals this week in class. We got the always important reminder that we are the most important person in our lives and that we need to continuing prioritizing our own well-being if we want to be able to help others.  My motivation remains that of improving my health.

I took a class in seminary where we were assigned the task of doing a theological reflection about a core life issue.  We got extra points for tying the reflection to a scripture from a religious tradition of our choice.  Working on that assignment, I realized that the story of the prophet Jeremiah really spoke to me.  He was one of the dudes who kept speaking truth to power, calling the wealthy to help the poor, etc.  They kept throwing him down a well, but he never shut up.  Speaking the truth is important, even if those in power don’t listen and don’t care.  Even in the bottom of a well, you can create ripples that can change things several millennia down the road.   The walls of the wells that confine us will eventually crumble.  Speak your truth.  Never give up.  Rock on Jeremiah. Rock on Anita Hill.   Rock on Christine Blasey Ford.

(My stats for the last week – down 4.3 pounds, drank over 7 gallons of water and exercised for  330 minutes.  My total weight loss so far is 57.6 pounds.)

This last week, I ate out for the first time in almost 6 months.  Twice!  It is the facilitator’s fault.  She passed out menus from fast food restaurants last week and asked us to try and find healthy choices.  I did better, I think, with Thai food (chicken/cabbage/red curry) and the grilled kanpachi with veggies I had at a decent fish restaurant.

I forgot to take a picture of my actual meal, but it was pretty much like the above, except the cauliflower was roasted not creamed.  I did have the chimichurri sauce which had olive oil. It is impossible to figure out the actual calories when you eat out, but I did try and be smart about it.  No rice or bread, and I avoided heavy sauces.

I think I stayed within my calorie budget, but I only lost .3 pounds last week.  That is OK.     Any loss is better than a gain, which is kind of the opposite of the rest of life.

We did nutrition this week in class, macro mainly, carbs, fat and protein.  I have been watching my carbs for years, to keep my blood sugar from spiking, so that is routine for me by now.  We need carbohydrates of course, and I am trying to get most of mine from the complex range, vegetables and a few whole grains.  Life is complex, but white bread and potatoes not so much.    I yearn sometimes for a simpler life, but it is not what my body needs when it comes to food.

I am also starting to thinking about going completely off the Optimist products.  (They recommend using 3 a day for the rest of our live!) I hate Nestle, the evil corporation that makes it, and the products are far from healthy natural food.  I think I can do better with snacks of string cheese, hard boiled eggs, fruit, veggies and other brands of protein bars in a pinch.  I am still in the thinking stage on that, but I have never been one for eating a lot of processed or packaged foods.  The Optifast products are definitely in that category.

This week has been hard emotionally. I have been very triggered by the US Supreme Court nominee and the Republican defense of sexual assault. I wrote the following poem this morning.

A Holy Rage

May all our rage be Holy. May we do what is good for ourselves and for each other.  May we be tender with the (so many) wounded among us.

(My stats for the last week – down  .3 pounds, drank over 7 gallons of water and exercised for 300 minutes.  My total weight loss so far is 53.3 pounds.)

I remember this feeling

Tightness in my chest

Fists clenching

Panicked tears.

The day my father was baptized

Was the day I stopped

Attending church.

It took me 30 years

To go back.

They knew what he was like

But it did not matter

I did not matter

They never asked me

They never cared enough.

Another drunken abuser

Is about to stagger into more power

Where he will no doubt

Abuse us all.

Where is our sacrament?

Where is our blessing?

Where is the salvation,

For the victims,

For the survivors?

I tell you this:

I am no longer a child

I know the truth

I will remember

And I will not forgive.

My rage is holy now.

I was very moved a few days ago by an article published on-line by my denomination.  You can read it (Here).  The series of short articles is called Braver/Wiser:    “Life is full of hard edges and complicated choices. Braver/Wiser gives you weekly messages of courage and compassion for life as it is. Every Wednesday we deliver an original written reflection by a contemporary religious leader, and brief prayer, grounded in Unitarian Universalism.”  How we need both courage and compassion in these times! In the relatively near future, I will be honored by having some words of my own included.

But, oh my! The Reverend Misha Sanders in her article reports an elderly woman, a stranger, saying to her in a store, “You have beautiful hair. If you slim down, Honey, you’ll have to fight off the men.”  I’ll let you read the article to find out how she responded, but it made me cry.  Read it please.

Her article also made me reflect on some of my own way of being in the world.

Some straight women say they want to be thin in order to be more attractive to men. This objectifies the female body in unhealthy ways, and if a fat women becomes thin and “finds a man” she will always wonder if he would have loved her if she had stayed fat.  God, I hate that idea.  Fat people are every bit as lovable as thin ones, and to deny that fact is part of the patriarchal rape culture.  In that culture, men see women as created for their pleasure, to use, so they can just be “boys being boys.”  So many of my sisters are filled with rage right now as rape is being defended by Rebublicans so desperate to control the Supreme Court that they don’t mind adding (another) sexual predator to that lofty bench.

That rage is almost all-consuming as I listen to as much of the hearings as I can stand.  But I am going to try to think of something else for a moment.  I have never been a serial dieter.  I can laugh that I lost the same 20 pounds twice, but others I know have done the yo-yo thing their whole lives.  I never wanted to be thinner in order to attract men, because, as a lesbian, my sense of other women is that they are attracted to the spirit of the person, the personality, not just the surface appearance.  I certainly did not want men, “fighting over me.”  Why does that phrase remind me of dogs fighting over a bone?  Bones have no agency.  Meat.  It is a frightening and disgusting concept that a woman would want that.

I obviously can’t change the subject today.  I can’t even think, because, yes, #metoo, and all survivors are triggered by what is happening.  I am stunned, but not surprised, by the callousness of the old white men sitting in judgement today, not really caring.  And I am awed by the courage of a woman brave enough to speak the truth.

(My stats for the last week – down  1.2 pounds, drank over 7 gallons of water and exercised for 330 minutes.  My total weight loss so far is 53 pounds.)

I have been seriously pissed off since the news of the attempted rape by the current nominee for the Supreme Court.  Why am I not surprised that the “groper in chief” would nominate another privileged and entitled white male who thinks the world and women were created for his use and pleasure?   Class and race issues abound here as well.  Our prisons are full of poor people and people of color who made a mistake when they were young, but this dude is unlikely to be held even marginally accountable.  Punk he was then and punk he still is.

Anger and stress are not necessarily great for staying on program, but last night we learned about “eustress” a stress that is experienced as beneficial, for example a challenge that can invigorate an person to engage in meeting and overcoming an obstacle.  For a problem to generate eustress, there needs, I think, to be some sense that we have the power within us to meet the challenge.  This is why the phrases, “you’ve got this” and “you can do it” are so helpful in support groups and frankly, in parenting.  No one makes progress when they are in despair.  I am sticking to the program, and to the Resistance, simply because I have to do so.   Keeping hope alive is an essential part of living well and fully.

There was a bump in the road this week when I read the following article:

Everything you know about obesity is wrong. 

So much was excellent about the article.

The comments about the medical profession rang true:

“Ask almost any fat person about her interactions with the health care system and you will hear a story, sometimes three,…. rolled eyes, skeptical questions, treatments denied or delayed or revoked. Doctors are supposed to be trusted authorities, a patient’s primary gateway to healing. But for fat people, they are a source of unique and persistent trauma. No matter what you go in for or how much you’re hurting, the first thing you will be told is that it would all get better if you could just put down the Cheetos.”

And that may be all you are told.  If you are fat, your actual medical condition which may need immediate treatment, is often overlooked and dismissed.  It has happened to me.

The article also did a good job of describing the harmful impacts of fat shaming.

“Paradoxically, as the number of larger Americans has risen, the biases against them have become more severe. More than 40 percent of Americans classified as obese now say they experience stigma on a daily basis, a rate far higher than any other minority group.”

The part that threw me off for awhile, however, was this:

“For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.”

This isn’t something I wanted to hear while I am in the middle of a weight management program that seems to be working.  I really question the statistics in the highlighted sentence, however, especially since no reference was given and I could not find that statistic on-line.  The last sentence also doesn’t ring true.  I have not felt hunger while on this program, cravings for certain foods, yes, but not actual hunger.  I really don’t expect to be battling hunger for the rest of my life.  Paying attention, yes, being careful about what and how much I eat, yes, prioritizing exercise, yes, but I am now seeing significant improvements in my health as a result of the weight I have already lost.  That is a incredible motivator as is the awesome support of the other members of my group.

And this week I made another milestone – over 50 pounds down!  I can see the changes when I look in the mirror, but even better, I can feel the changes when I need to climb some stairs.

May 16                                                                                      September 19

(My stats for the last week – down  3.1 pounds, drank over 7 gallons of water and exercised for 310 minutes.  My total weight loss so far is 51.8 pounds.)