mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Obesity according to Wikipedia

Link: Obesity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Thank you, o multitudinous editors of Wikipedia, for an impressively balanced and objective article about obesity--including detailed mention of numerous associated controversies and differences of opinion. They even take a few whacks at the inherent arbitariness and inaccuracies of such statistical measurements as the BMI, as well as mentioning the genetic and metabolic underpinnings of body weight and the various risks of current treatments, Bless their hearts, they even give a brief overview of cultural views of obesity, including those cultures and historical periods in which fat was viewed as a positive rather than a negative thing.

If you are ever dealing with some fatphobic jerk who is all over your ass about your weight being a moral failing or other such ignorant crap, try this article out on them. It's neutral enough that it might well sneak up on them and educate them before they realize they're having their prejudices undermined. And then you can hit 'em with the more radical stuff.

Today's weigh-in: happy 300! plus adjustments

Today's magic number on my HMO's big ol' scale: 300 pounds even, for a total of 34 pounds lost since January 25th.

This represented a 1.5 pound weight loss, my lowest weekly drop yet. I suspect my taking it easy exercise-wise because of my screwed up knee last week had a lot to do with that. My knee is still not 100% back, though, so I think this week I'll compensate by dropping that extra unit of carb exchange I added to my food regimen a few weeks ago. (I don't want to lose weight too fast, but on the other hand I sure don't want to slow down to nuthin'!)

I'm beginning to really notice some changes in the shape and size of my body. I'm definitely feeling like my body's center of gravity has shifted somewhat. On one level, this feels really good physically--for instance, there is noticeably less strain on my back because those muscles aren't having to fight so hard to counterbalance the weight of my gut. On the other hand, this could also explain how I freaked my knee out--as my body mass and center of gravity shifts around, it no doubt affects how that weight distributes itself on my weight-bearing joints, which could then cause other things to temporarily go out of whack.

So, note to self: be a lot more attentive to how I shift my weight onto various parts of my frame as I move about, trying to avoid any sudden joint-crunching moves. And work on strengthening muscles to better support those crunchy joints.

Exercise Trumps Diet for Weight Loss

Link: Exercise Trumps Diet for Weight Loss.

"These findings were surprising to us as scientists," Cameron says. "We always assumed food intake was the main control of body weight and that dieting was the best way to control this. From these results, you are forced to think how active you are is more important than how much you eat."

"I don't think most people who try to diet will be surprised," Cameron says. "The body immediately tries to compensate for calories you are not taking in by dropping your metabolic rate and lowering your activity level. There was no way to get around the fact that activity matters a great deal. Altogether, our feeling is that activity is very, very important in controlling body weight."

Sigh. No, I'm not surprised. But while I'm glad they're finally doing studies to prove this stuff to themselves to their satisfaction, I can't help being rather peeved that the white-coat types are still surprised. Especially since I spent years trying to lose weight their way, and being shut down whenever I'd have the temerity to point out that it was not freakin' working.

Alternatives to the dreaded leafy green salad

One of the many casualties of my years of action in the Dieting Wars was my former love of leafy green salads. I actually used to enjoy such salads, even as a kid, when it was often my job to make the big bowl o' salad that graced our dinner table almost every night. To be sure, that salad may have been a sop to my food-loving family's collective conscience--yeah, we were inhaling mass quantities of meat and potatoes at those same dinners, but the presence of the green stuff somehow made that alright. And we didn't gloop that salad up too much, either--my parents' approach to a vinaigrette dressing was decidedly light on the oil and heavy on the vinegar (we did 1:1 oil to vinegar, whereas the typical ratio in most cookbook vinaigrette recipes is more like 4:1 oil to vinegar).

But then entered the evil dieting mentality, and suddenly leafy green salads became the signature Dieter's Penance Food. And those wretched, wretched, WRETCHED bottled diet salad dressings! How the hell do they get away with selling that crap?!? I can only assume that many dieters, including myself for some years, suffered with that stuff only because it was better than the prospect of chowing down on those bales and bales of rabbit-food naked and unadorned (the rabbit-food, that is, not the persons doing the chowing down).

Oh, and the mental games--like the time-honored Abuse the Salad Bar game. How many inches high can you pile your dinner plate and still consider it "one dinner salad"? And then chewing one's way through that joyless pile of low-quality greenery, trying to convince oneself that it was satisfying.

Fortunately, there have been some improvements on the salad front since those days. One of the single biggest improvements can be summed up in a single word: mesclun. Yes, when that classic mix of gourmet salad greens made its leap from the salad courses of chichi restaurants and the produce bins of upscale greengrocers to the shelves of mainstream supermarkets, the world of salads took a great leap forward from the days of wedges of iceberg doused with flourescent-orange "french" dressing.

But my own personal aha moment was in some ways even more radical: as I perused the containers of salsa and pico de gallo at my local supermarket one day, it hit me: who said salads had to have any lettuce at all in them?

And thus I stumbled backwards into the long-lost world of chopped salads, which were apparently all the rage in the 1950s but somehow got eclipsed in favor of all those leafy lawn-clippings. Somehow I find the little chunks of tomato, cucumbers, peppers, and so on much more satisfying than the raw leafy greens--and yet all those chopped veggies are nearly as diet-friendly as a lettuce-based salad (provided you don't get freaky with the dressing). I eventually developed my own all-purpose template for chopped salad, into which I could fit any number of vegetables and seasonings depending on whim, what looked good at the market, and what in my vegetable bin was screaming to be used up before it became a biology experiment.

So here's the basic template, with all sorts of suggestions for variations.

• About four cups worth of mixed raw vegetables of your choice, cut into more-or-less same-sized dice. Veggies I've used include: tomatoes (I think meaty Romas work better than spherical slicer tomatoes for this purpose; your choice as to whether to remove or include the seeds and jellied bits); scallions (green and white parts); regular onions (the sweeter the better); cucumbers (I like English and pickling cucumbers better than regular cukes for this, especially because the former two usually don't need peeling); bell peppers, any color; radishes (I find the big Asian daikon radishes much handier for chopping purposes than the cute little red radishes); zucchini; tomatillos; and pretty much anything else that tastes nice raw and can be easily cubed
• Herbs and seasonings of your choice. You can mix and match, or go for a specific flavor profile--for instance, I often take my chopped salad in a Mexican direction by choosing cilantro, minced fresh jalapenos, and a clove or two of minced garlic as my seasonings. Or you can go Mediterranean with fresh basil and more garlic; or in an Asian direction with grated ginger root, cilantro, and more garlic. (Garlic is pretty much a constant with me.)
• A dressing of your choice. Yes, if you insist, you could just splash on some bottled dressing, diet or otherwise. But why do that, when there are so many varieties of oils, vinegars, citrus juices, and other ingredients available? Especially since you then have full control over how much oil, if any, goes into your salad? I like to make my dressings really tangy, with a ratio of 1:3 oil to acid. And again, I often pick a flavor theme--for instance, if I've decided on a Mexican thing with the jalapenos and cilantro, I'll go with lime juice instead of vinegar for the dressing. Don't forget copious grindings of fresh pepper, and a pinch or so of salt to taste.

Chop your veggies and seasonings, mix up your dressings, combine and toss, and voila! A nice big fresh salad with nary a leafy green thing in sight. And unlike leafy green salads, this concoction actually benefits from sitting around in its dressing overnight. Whereas a dressed leafy green salad would wilt into an unattractive slimy mass with such treatment, a chopped salad will spend the night swapping flavors around and mellowing. Plus the leftovers make great relishes to put on other foods.

Mind you, I have also made my peace, to a certain extent, with the leafy greens. In fact, I've been known to buy bags of those pre-mixed salad greens from the supermarket and munch on them straight from the bag instead of potato chips--something iceberg lettuce has never tempted me into doing. But those chopped salads--they have been a boon to my vegetable-eating ways. Give it a try yourselves, and see what you think.

MedlinePlus: Signs of long-term problems seen in teens' dieting

Link: MedlinePlus: Signs of long-term problems seen in teens' dieting.

Yep. The results of the linked study pretty much match my personal experience. I started doing Stillman in my mid-teens, and things just went downhill from there. Nice to have that experience corroborated. Think it'll stop high-minded efforts now underway to inflict dieter's mentality on kids in schools? I know they're all concerned about the so-called epidemic of obesity, but you just know the whole effort will only get institutionalized into another mortifying horror-show for the chubby kids. Anyway--check the study out. Pounding kids over the head with diets is not the answer.

Arthritis and the hazards of overdoing it

Sigh. I have managed, once again, to do something weird to my bad left knee, the one the doctors have for-sure identified as having osteoarthritis going on. No doubt osteoarthritis is also happening in other weight-bearing joints as well, but it's the left knee in which they've actually spotted something in an X-ray that might possibly be a bone spur. And it's the one that most frequently misbehaves. Among its repertoire of bad behaviors:

• occasional "rice crispies"--little clicking noises, sometimes more a sensation of something catching than an audible click
• less frequently, something in the joint catching enough that I can't quite totally straighten the knee. Sometimes standing upright will cause the knee to "click" again and release; sometimes that only happens with a lot of pain, and sometimes nothing can persuade that knee to unlock short of getting the hell off that leg and letting it rest undisturbed for a few hours.
• thankfully very rarely, a sensation of something shifting laterally within the joint, immediately followed by excruciating grab-all-your-attention pain. When this happens, it can take days or even weeks for the knee to return to normal, until which time I've sometimes even had to resort to crutches.

And then there's just everyday random assorted stiffness and achiness--upon arising, upon standing in one place too long, upon walking a litle too far or too fast, upon stepping down too hard or with unexpected torque on the joint, after resting it motionless for too long. In other words--when doesn't it bug me?

Sometimes these knee misbehaviors seem to come out of nowhere--somehow I manage to sleep with my knee at a funny angle, despite all my attempts to protect the knee with pillows and whatnot. Or I stumble and land on my left foot harder than I intended. Or the weather is doing something screwy--yes, the thing about arthritic joints acting up during stormy weather is not an old wive's tale. But a lot of the time my knee screws up because I get tempted into overdoing it.

This is an incredibly common dynamic among arthritis sufferers, as well as many others living with chronic diseases whose effects fluctuate. One day you wake up and you're feeling uncommonly good--well rested, full of energy, pain absent or greatly reduced--and your first reaction is "Hurrah! I feel so good, I think I'll take a walk!" Or whatever other physical activity you haven't done in awhile and miss dearly. So you take your walk, and you try and take it easy, and it feels really good. So you try someting more strenuous--and wow, you can do that too! And it feels pretty good too! So you do a little more ... and you go on like that, feeling great ... until the next day when your body goes "uh-oh!" and you realize that once again you got suckered.

I've been really enjoying my recent spate of renewed energy and reduced pain, presumably due to my progress in taking weight off my body and my knees. But as of yesterday I got the first signal that I had definitely slipped into overdoing mode, when my knee started in with its occasional-locking routine. This particular behavior is typically ascribed to a tear in the meniscus, the little wedge of cartilage that rides between the (also cartilage-covered) bone-ends that make up the knee joint. These kind of tears typically bedevil two groups of people: young athletes, such as football players, who get their knees banged up in their sports; and (usually) older folks whose cartilage is suffering the cululative wear-and-tear damage of osteoarthritis.

In either case, sometimes a little bit of torn meniscus cartilage flops around so that it's obstructing the smooth motion of the joint--voila, a locked knee. The "click" sensation is presumably that little cartilage flap popping in and out of its correct location. And often the disturbance is enough to kick off the body's inflammation response, so now you're dealing with painful swelling around the knee in addition to the locking biz.

The problem with cartilage is that a lot of it does not have its own blood supply, so that it's not receiving the kind of nourishment tissues need to self-heal. Still, if the tear can be calmed down a little bit, you can usually get on with life. So the usual first line treatment is to be conservative and just use rest, anti-inflammatories and occasional icepacks to calm the whole area down. If that doesn't work well enough, though, you're basically looking at surgery.

Even if a meniscus tear isn't involved, overdoing it can provoke a general arthritis flare--an annoying state in which even joints you swear you weren't using decide to start aching in general sympathy with the joints that got the brunt of the abuse. And when it happens, there's nothing for it but to take it easy, get out the ibuprofen and icepacks, allocate an evening for a long hot soak in the tub, and just wait the sucker out.

Then you're confronted with the next conundrum: completely motionless waiting, or not? Because your arthritis will also cause your joints to stiffen up if you keep them motionless for too long. So, now you're in a balancing act of getting the angriest joint enough immobility time to calm down, vs. gently stretching and moving the body--including that joint--so that it doesn't stiffen up on you while you're waiting for relief.

Plus you're no doubt juggling a whole bunch of emotional crap about the whole situation as well: "Ah shit! Not again! And I was doing so well! Is this ever going to end? Am I never going to be able to exercise safely without putting myself back on the bench again? Oh hell, what's the use?" And on and on and yadda yadda yadda.

The most damnable part of this whole thing, though, is how subtle the line is between healthy doing and damaging overdoing. Yeah, you can usually tell pretty immediately if you do something that actively bangs up the joint, but oftentimes there is no detectable sensation when you cross the magic line into overdoing-it land. You feel good the entire time. You may not even feel like you're especially pushing yourself. Your only defense is knowing, from painful past experience, how much you historically get away with before having a problem the next day. But if your general condition is improving (or, god forbid, deteriorating), that danger point can move.

So if you're determined to increase your physical activity, you're stuck in a continual process of trial-and-error, in which you cautiously work up to your previous limit, then wait to see how your body handles that, then the next day maybe do just a little bit more, wash rinse repeat. Except for those times you just say hell with it and decide to boogie like a madwoman to a tune on the radio. In which case, all bets are off--but at least you can cheer yourself up with how damn good that boogie-ing felt at the time.

I'm still very much in struggle with this. There really isn't a helluva lot more that I can do about it on the physical/medical plane than I'm doing right now--well, there's the surgical option, of course, but I'm bound and determined to avoid that (besides, I'm willing to bet no surgeon would operate on my knee while I still have so much weight on my body ready to damage the knee some more). But in the meantime I've got anti-inflammatory drugs; I've got ice packs and epsom salts; and that's pretty much it.

So, as in so much of the rest of my health-improvement effort, the big action seems to be the mental game: keeping my attitude positive despite the (almost literally) two steps forward one step back dance of the crappy knees. While I am considerably bummed at this latest bout of knee-locking, I am also trying to bear forcefully in mind that this bout is considerably less nasty than others I have experienced in the past, due no doubt to all my other recent health-wise efforts. In other words, even though this is one step back, the net progress is still forward.

As long as I don't freak out, say hell with it and run away (crawl away?) to console myself with the Dreaded Takeout Pizza Self-Destruction. Which, especially when put that way, doesn't really hold a whole lot of appeal. Nope. No running away. This too shall pass ... and I shall soon be up and (hopefully not over)doing it again.

Today's weigh-in--plus: dances with scales

Today's numbers, courtesy of my weekly class: 301.5 pounds, down another two pounds from the previous week, for a total loss of 32.5 pounds lost since January 24th. The weight-loss machine continues to purr along contentedly. Our class is now officially done with our initial 12-week program, and are proceeding with a series of wrap-up meetings, though the format seems to be remaining the same. Eventually those will end too, and then we'll be down to monthly followup meetings.

I just might keep dropping by on a weekly basis anyway, just to use my HMO's super-accurate scales. There are two of these babies in the lobby of the wellness center, consisting of floor-level metal platforms big enough to roll a wheelchair onto, with little printers attached so that you can get an official recording of your weight to the nearest half-pound. The only problem with having two of 'em, however, is that people overly obsessed with the magic number on the scale feel compelled to get a weight printout from both scales to discover which one is weighing a little lower each week (insert glyph of eyes rolling heavenward here), which sometimes causes quite a line to use the scales.

But it still beats hell out of taking my weight on a home bathroom scale. Those things are notoriously inaccurate unless you spend a ridiculous amount of money for a premium job. And then you're confronted with the huge compulsion to be jumping on the scale five times a day to see what your weight is doing--been there, done that, had the psychodrama over it. So--no scales in the house, that's one of my ground rules.

I do still weigh and measure a lot of my food whenever dining at home. I'm still just a little too given to overestimating portion sizes, particularly when it comes to protein, my heretofore favorite pig-out foods. Here using the scale actually relieves some tendencies to obsess--no need to fret about whether I'm either cheating myself or cheating my food plan, because the scale reveals all. Yeah, the little crappy diet scale is also inaccurate as hell, but as I'm always using the same little scale, whatever errors are introduced are consistent across all my measurements. At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

P.S. I might be a little more scarce here on this blog for the next couple of weeks, as I have a few work-related deadlines looming large (yes, I do actually have a life outside of blogging and working on my health, heh). But I do check in here on a daily basis, so please to keep posting comments as you desire--I will notice, and respond.

A hard day's night: a little post-full moon madness

Wow. Last night was rough. Definitely the roughest night I've experienced so far, in terms of pure raw food cravings, since I started this health regimen. I did not go off-program and binge my brains out, but man, did I ever want to.

As expected, my period hit like gangbusters late Saturday night. Lately I've been noticing this tendency to have one last spike in the food-craving urges in the first day of my period. I made it through most of Sunday okay, but by Sunday night that paradoxical last-hurrah food craving spike was in full swing. Plus I was massively crampy and cranky, and just generally possessed of a feeling of ick. In the past, this would have been the perfect set-up for one of those pizza-inhaling sessions from my all-too-recent past.

Not so last night. Fortunately, I kind of expected this to happen, so I had reserved several units of carb exchange that day just in case. I was thus able to switch my food-consumption gameplan to mollify-the-munchies mode, and turned to the trusty low-fat popcorn and brown rice cakes. These foods offer lots of plain unabashed low-calorie volume to satisfy the oral-fixation snacking reflex, a little over-indulgence in salt to get the junk-food jones to shut up, and some actual healthy food value in terms of fiber (whole-kernel corn is, after all, a whole intact grain; and brown rice ditto). To intensify the junk-food-satisfying effect, I annointed the rice cakes with some spicy brown mustard--hey, it's not a New York soft pretzel, but it'll do in an emergency.

Result: I made it through the night--not to mention putting the final touches on my tax returns!--without eating anything I shouldn't. Even though my roommate had half a left-over chocolate cream pie stashed away in the fridge--yikes!

And when I awoke this morning, my state of mind with regard to food was a good bit more civilized. Thank goodness. I'm not sure if I'm totally out of the woods yet--we'll see how I am this evening--but I think I'm through the worst of it.

Another pattern I have noticed in recent years: once my period gets under way and gets past any initial binge-spike, the hormones shift gears once again, and suddenly my urge to eat drops off to nothing. I mean nothing. I mean, only noticing something is odd when I look up at around 5pm and think, gee, dinner-time already and somehow I forgot to eat all day, how did I do that? I mean, I never forget to eat, what the hell is this?!?!? Well, what it is, is the power of the almighty hormones.

I hesitate to think what would happen if the pharmaceutical industry tried to capture that appetite-suppressed state in a pill--I don't think I'd want to take something that manipulated my hormones that profoundly. Nor do I think it's all that good for one to ride with that natural bout of anorexia--fasting, despite what some alternative health pundits say, is not particularly good for you, especially if you have any of a number of health issues (gout and diabetes, just to name two; the first is a definite issue for me, and while I don't have the second, I am definitely sensitive to precipitous drops in blood sugar levels).

So if I'm shifting into the post-period no-eat phase, my task becomes that of riding my food plan and making myself eat my full allotment for that day. Definitely a weird turn of events for someone with my history regarding food--but if I had to choose between fighting off the binge-compulsion and fighting to make myself eat more, I know which one I think is more fun.

The moon is full and so am I: coping with PMS

My little sister, who unlike anyone else in my immediate family was petite and svelte from birth, has remained so throughout her life without any struggle, even after two pregnancies. She's just one of these people who, although she likes food just fine, seems to have a natural built-in tendency to eat just enough and then stop. However, she did once tell me this revealing story from the very beginning of her first pregnancy.

Seems she and her husband were over at a friend's place for a barbeque. Now normally Sis prefers to eat very light--salads, no red meat, et cetera and so forth. However, at some point in the party her husband looked over at her, and slightly startled, asked her, "Honey, what is that you're eating?" And Sis looked down and realized she was in the process of inhaling a humongous juicy hamburger. Apparently the pregnancy hormones had taken a vote without my sister's conscious knowledge, and decided grilled chicken breast was definitely not on the menu that afternoon.

Now this type of behavior does make perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Just as in any other animal, there is a certain pre-programmed aspect to human behavior, especially around behaviors that are basic to species survival. And what could be more crucial to species survival than a pregnant mother receiving ample nutritiion to nourish the growing fetus inside her, to have the strength to go through the process of labor and birth, and to supply enough milk to feed her newborn? So of course hardwired behaviors would have evolved such as an "EAT LIKE CRAZY!" response to pregnancy, triggered by the hormonal and other biochemical changes associated with the onset of the pregnancy process.

Which explains why, when those same hormones gear up for the monthly dry run of the pregnancy system known as the menstrual cycle, many women hit that lovely little patch of PMS in which you suddenly want to eat everything that isn't nailed down (and a few things that are). But while this monthly urge to binge probably didn't cause all that much harm to early peoples, in our modern sedendary junk-food-ridden culture such monthly fress-attacks can definitely make a few waves. Especially when one is trying to maintain any sort of weight management regimen.

One of my favorite long-running topics over on The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters is entitled PMS: Tell it Like It Is. Your cravings, Babe. Here in this liberated space, mature sophisticated women who usually post about elegantly-plated morsels and the current produce at their favorite farmers' markets gleefully confess their monthly run-ins with the PMS "eat like crazy" switch. Each woman seems to have their favorite craves at these times, but the consensus seems to run pretty strongly to mass quantities of fat, salt, and carbohydrate. Chocolate and hunks of rare beef figure prominently, though bacon, booze, and Ben & Jerry's also have their champions. (Heh. If you peruse that topic over on eGullet.org, you will no doubt come upon some posts of mine--including several dating from before I went on this regimen. The one in which I confess to inhaling the majority of a large fully-loaded delivery pizza particularly sticks in my memory.)

As I said, how to handle such cravings in the midst of a serious weight-management effort is an interesting challenge, one that definitely gave me pause as I started my own little project in that vein. I have always had pretty strong PMS symptoms, but they really took off in my late 20s, after my last "success" at dieting down to goal weight the old-fashioned way. Not during the two years I maintained goal weight--quite the opposite, actually. For that entire interval, in fact, I had no period whatsoever; apparently, the medically-recommended weight I maintained during that whole time put me below the minimum body fat level for my system to menstruate. (Though it wasn't from my doctors that I learned this little fact; they themselves seemed clueless about it, and the ob/gyn they sent me to was no better.)

No, the nasty surprise came after I finally broke that diet and put on enough weight for my period to return. And boy did it ever return like gangbusters! I'll spare you the details of the new "improved" period itself--except here's a couple of hints: "OW!!!" And "damn, I can't be out of tampons again already?!?!?" More to the point of this blog, though: just as my period returned much nastier than it had been before it vanished, my PMS also ratcheted up by a few orders of magnitude. Suddenly I was getting a whole lot moodier at "that time" every month. I was bloating like a dirigible, and feeling like my breasts wanted to explode. And the urge to inhale the contents of the refrigerator went right through the roof. And I had no idea why.

It was only some years later, doing my own research to figure all this out, that I not only discovered the connection between my amenorrhea and excessively low body weight, but also that a well-known after-effect of such amenorrhea is major intensification of PMS symptoms once enough weight is put on to restart one's cycle. Once more, with feeling: gee thanks, docs, for not telling me about any of this shit (especially when all this info was right there in books; tell me again why I pay these people?)

Anyway, moving right along ... If my monthly visits from Aunt Flo weren't already gothic enough, I began to edge up into the age of perimenopause and things really began to get primitive. Suddenly Vicodin for menstrual cramps did not seem unreasonable at all. A whole new PMS sympton raised its ugly head: an increase in my arthritis pain as my period loomed closer. And all the already fierce PMS symptoms got even fiercer. This is the point at which I entered the realm of full pizza inhalation and similar monthly food insanities.

By the time I got to January of this year and finally decided to take my weight and health into my own hands, I expected that one of my biggest challenges was going to be when that ol' devil moon got full again. (That's not just another cutesy euphemism, by the way--due no doubt to some warped sense of humor on the part of the Menstrual Goddesses, my period seems to want to be in sync with the moon. In fact, its and my fullness tonight is what prompted the the subject of this post).

But imagine my relief when, as my first period approached, I found myself much less ridden by all of my PMS symptoms, including the compulsion to binge. I'm still not quite sure how that happened. There is some info out there suggesting that food regimens such as mine (low in fats, high in complex carbohydrates, spread out over several small meals throughout the day) can help relieve PMS symptoms, possibly because the high-carb diet ups the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and the many small meals keeps the blood sugar stabilized.

Whatever the reason, the timing definitely suggests some connection between my new regimen and my new kinder gentler periods. I'm not retaining water nearly as much as before, my baseline joint achiness is no longer spiked upward right before a period, and while I do feel some slight urges to consume mass quantities, those urges are much easier to face down than formerly. Now it may be that I'm feeling less urge to binge simply because of the psychological effects of feeling so optimistic about how well I'm doing so far ... but given that I'm also not bloating like a dirigible or feeling like my breasts are going to 'splode, I'm pretty certain there is something biochemical going on as well.

And as for those urges to overeat that do exist? Fortunately, my food regimen includes a couple of handy pressure-release valves. One of those is the occasional preplanned splurge meal thing. Another is the permission, as the instructor of my weight management class puts it, to "party on vegetables" if I do want to assuage the consume-mass-quantities urge in some non-destructive way.

Still, in the old days neither an occasional controlled splurge nor a binge on broccoli would have done a damn thing to mollify the urge to binge. So I am massively grateful that, for whatever reason, things within me have changed sufficiently that I am no longer such a slave to the full moon.

Excellent article about body fat

From the website of the magazine Diabetes Self-Management: a long, thorough yet easy-to-read exploration of the function of fat in the human body. Though the emphasis is, as its title states, on getting rid of fat through exercise, I found the article most helpful for telling me a whole lot of fascinating stuff I did not know about the mechanics and chemistry of how the body digests, stores, and uses fat. For instance, I did not realize that fatty tissue deposits function as glands as well as storage for fatty acid molecules, secreting a host of enzymes, hormones, and neurotransmitters. And the exercise advice is actually rather helpful too.

Link: Diabetes Self-Management - Burning Fat Through Exercise.