mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude: Why the hell I'm doing this

March 13, 2006

Why the hell I'm doing this

Okay, so here's the thing: I have been dealing with overweight issues my entire life. I have gone through any number of diets both sensible and stupid, with (supposedly) appropriate supervision and support, and without; have even succeeded at the game a couple different times (took off a huge amount of weight, hit goal weight, kept it off multiple years) only to reach a point at which I could not stick with it anymore; have gone through other periods in which I just got fed up and went on strike against dieting for years on end; and just generally experienced that yoyo-ing up and down in weight, always higher with each upswing, all too well known to lifelong fat people--until now at age 49 I found myself with some significant health issues ... plus a distrust of the dieting and medical industry a mile wide.

Clearly I needed to do something about this situation--but the question was: what?!? Equally clear to me was the fact that every stick of advice I had ever received from a "trustworthy" authority on dieting needed drastic questioning. Some of it did sorta work for me, however sporadically; and I'm sure all of it must have worked for somebody somewhere at one time or another; but a lot of it, in hindsight, had obviously backfired for me.

Now, at some of the points in my life when I found myself just saying "fuck all this dieting shit," I went to hang with the Fat Liberation/Size Acceptance movement. There I did learn a whole bunch of eye-opening stuff about the ridiculously high rate of failure of traditional diets (let's just say that if a drug with that failure rate tried to get FDA approval, the panel of experts would be so busy falling out of their chairs laughing they'd have trouble holding the "DENIED" stamp as they brought it down *boom* on the request). They also really raised my consciousness about the societal "tyrrany of slenderness" which brainwashes everyone from rank-and-file diet junkies to medical authorities into the relentless drive to get the number on the scale to match those unrealistic actuarial tables, by whatever means necessary however harmful (i.e. bariatric surgery, whose failure rate should also be making the FDA laugh, but unfortunately is getting an undeserved pass).

Alas, however, the Fat Liberation party line didn't have a lot of advice for when I eventally started to experience significant health problems because of my weight. I do still believe it's perfectly possible to be healthy, active, and athletic even when carrying a significant amount of weight above the numbers in those damfool actuarial tables. However, after years of ever-increasing weight and inadequate exercise, my knees and ankles began to give out; and from there began a nasty little downward spiral of pain leading to more inactivity leading to more pain plus other medical weirdnesses, until now I've got a real situation on my hands--a problem that, no doubt about it, would be a good bit more tractable if I were a good bit lighter.

I think the final kicker was watching my dad die a little over a year ago. After years of playing Russian roulette with his food, health, and type 2 diabetes treatment, the inevitable happened and his kidneys gave out. He then was random in his compliance with dialysis treatment until he went down the tubes completely. And I found myself comparing his situation to mine. Yeah, it's true, the dieting and medical industry has IMO large amounts of bullshit going on--but was the most helpful response to that to just say "fuck it" and do as I pleased, the way my dad did? Did I really want to die the miserable way my dad did, or something similar?

You would think that would be sufficient motivation ... but after all the aggravation and outright trauma (mental and physical) I'd endured from my previous dieting forays, it took about a year for me to work up the will to give it yet another go. Fortunately, I happened to get into an experimental weight-loss program through my HMO, in which the goal--thank goddess!--is NOT to drive to "goal weight" nomatter what--the goal is to help its participants put off or even completely avoid knee replacement surgery, and generally improve their health, by taking off some weight through exercise and healthy eating. They don't even require any specific regimen (although they offer a lot of suggestions). They mainly tell you to try and figure out what works best for you, so that you can comfortably maintain the behavior changes over the long term.

How refreshing!

So, thus liberated to question authority and find what actually works best for me, I have been giving it another go. And so far--since January 25th of this year--it's actually been going fairly well. But that's only about, what, six or seven weeks worth, and I'm hoping to keep this up for a looooooooong period of time. So I'm seeking ways to support that goal.

Which brings us to this blog.

Yeah, I know--does the Web really need yet another blog about people's tedious personal goings-on? Probably not--but that's not the main reason for it. (Although I'll shamelessly cop to the streak of personal ego-aggrandizement involved in public blogging.) No, the primary motivation is to keep me going in a healthier direction as long as humanly possible--without getting pissed off or discouraged or baffled or any of the other things that caused me to give up on that direction the previous go-rounds.

Along the way, I'll be doing a lot of musing-out-loud about food, nutrition and health; the dieting and medical industries and how I think they misguide people; the cultural prejudices and superstitions about weight and diet that have bedeviled many people besides myself; and other random things that I think relate. You see, I am also a strong believer in the 1970s/80s feminist aphorism that "the personal is political"; I am convinced that overweight and related health issues do not occur in a vaccuum, but have far-reaching cultural, economic, and political contexts that I have needed to confront in order to make any progress. After all, it's a lot easier to succeed at something if you have a fully accurate assessment of what-all forces you're working against.

There will also be, I suspect, a huge amount about food itself--its pleasures as well as its health-enhancing benefits. There is no two ways about it: I love food. And I've discovered from hard experience that any diet or food regimen that does not figure out how to play nicely with my love of food is doomed to make me crazy and go AWOL sooner or later. Instead of denying such a powerful force, I really need to harness it in a positive way. So there will inevitably be posts about recipes, ingredients, stores, restaurants, etc. that I have found helpful to my little quest.

But primarily, I'll be going over in great detail my little discoveries on what does and doesn't work for me; my triumphs and my stuck places; my self-talk to keep me going--just a general document of my progress on this little project. Yes, it's a bit of a grand exercise in self-absorption--but after spending huge hunks of my life dedicated to all sorts of projects for other people, I kinda think I'm overdue for making myself the focus of my life.

March 13, 2006 at 03:30 PM in General commentary, Why the hell I'm doing this | Permalink