mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

First major travel under the new dispensation

By the way, I'm about to confront another couple of milestones in my weight loss saga: first major trip out of town, and first airline travel.

Many of you reading this know all too well what a hell-on-earth of discomfort and humiliation an airline trip can be for a person of size. Remember the huge flap a few years ago when it became public knowledge that Southwest Airlines had a protocol for charging passengers who could not fit into their even-narrower-than-industry-standard coach seat a double fare for a second seat? And that said protocol involved informing the unlucky passenger that they were fat enough to require an extra seat right there in public in front of all the other passengers? Well, at my top weight I happened to be just borderline on their humiliate-the-fat-person double-seat protocol--I could just fit between the armrests of their preternaturally tiny seats, but had to request a seatbelt extender. So, fortunately, I never had the pleasure of the buy-a-second-seat humiliation, but I did experience the joy of having to ask the flight attendants--and sometime remind them multiple times--to please bring me the goddamned seatbelt extender already.

Not to mention enduring the baleful glare of whoever wound up sitting next to "the fat slob." Never mind that those super-narrow coach seats are also too narrow for strapping healthy young men, whose little butts might fit perfectly in the seats, but whose manly broad shoulders and gun-type biceps might still infringe on their neighbors' space in all directions. Naw, nobody whines and snivels about having to sit next to passengers with huge shoulders poking them, but you should hear some of the crap airline passengers spew about sitting next to people with big bellies or hips. And hardly anybody remembers this is all an artificial problem created by the airlines, intent on packing as many sardines into the tin can as they can get away with.

Oh, and don't even get me started on airplane lavatories. How the hell anyone bigger than a twelve-year-old uses those little coffins in anything resembling comfort, I do not know.

Well, for better or worse, I will now by virtue of my smaller bod be spared the majority of that insanity ... but that doesn't mean I'm out of the woods. For on my e-ticket are the fatal words: "food for purchase."

Yep. Airlines make you pay for your meals now. And they no longer seem to have any way to request special meals for various health reasons. Further, I haven't flown since they instituted all those new airport security restrictions on what you can bring on the plane. And I'm sorry, I've read the TSA website a bazillion times now, and can still find no definitive answers on what foods it is safe to take through security. And if you guess wrong, guess what? You're automatically in trouble with the law. I'm sorry, but that's fucked up.

Okay, yeah, I can buy food and drink inside the security perimeter. But just think of the quality--and price!--of the typical fast-food crap you find in airports. If I'm lucky, I might be able to score one of those awful salads that Mickey D's put on their menu so they can pretend they serve "healthy" food, with the boring mass of iceberg lettuce and the disgusting low-fat dressing. If I'm unlucky ... guess I'll be eating my very first fast-food burger since I went on my regimen, huh? Bleah. A food item I have not missed one whit, and now it's looking like my best chance at an even slightly palatable meal.

Anyway, enough of my whining about that. Once I do touch down in Charlotte NC, where I'll be visiting family, things should get a bit more pleasant ... and also a bit more challenging. This is a pleasure trip, after all, and so I have to figure out how I will navigate the food aspect, balancing legitimate enjoyment of the area's local cuisine against the desire to stay healthy and not go overboard. Considering Charlotte's local-cuisine claims to fame are apparently soul food and North Carolina-style barbeque, this might look a little dicey.

But I have decided two things: 1) this trip will not be an excuse to just randomly blow away the whole regimen with indiscriminate eating; and 2) neither will this trip be about puritanical self-denial. There is always a middle path, and I intend to find it.

Once I get off the damn plane anyway. Gah. I never liked flying. And I still don't. I may have made a lot of changes in the past fourteen months, but some things never change.

P.S. I will have Internet access while I'm traveling. I'm not sure how much time I'll have available to post, given that I'm supposed to be doing a lot of family stuff. So we'll see if I can make some progress reports while I'm out there. I'll be for sure posting a summary report when I return.

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: goal weight gavotte

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 210.0 lb
• Change since last week: -4.0 lb (!)
• Cumulative weight loss: 124.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.91

Nope, the brand-new bathroom scale is not broken--I checked. I'm just going to chalk this precipitous drop up to the vagaries of water weight weirdness. But as much as I try to stay detached from the numbers, it does make me smile.

For more reasons than one. When I first started this project 14 months ago at 334 pounds, I was trying to avoid picking a goal weight because I remembered how crazed I used to get about that particular flavor of magic number. So I went about saying that I'd just shoot for 200 pounds and see what things looked like when I got there, figuring that 200 pounds was so far off that I would have plenty of time to get my head on right about matters.

Well ... guess what? 200 pounds is now not all that distant. So: what do I think of where I'm currently at?

All in all, I'm incredibly happy with my progress so far. My mobility has improved massively. Even though my left knee continues to flake out from time to time, it doesn't do so anywhere near as frequently as it used to, and it recovers from such flake-outs a good deal faster than before. I've succeeded in doing away with one of my blood pressure meds and halving the dosage of the other. I am now doing without my CPAP machine on a regular basis, and seem none the worse for wear. I can now walk a half mile with no major discomfort. I can dance through most of an evening rock show with only moderate stiffness the next day. If you had told me two years ago I'd be doing all these things now I would have thought you were nutz.

And while I'm resolutely trying not to concentrate on the aesthetic aspects of the weight loss, there's no denying that I've been enjoying the positive changes on that front as well.

But I still have some goals I haven't reached. Ideally I'd like to be totally off of all blood pressure meds. And while the knee damage may make it impossible for me to ever go backpacking again, I'd like to be able to increase my walking range to a mile--which, in my current neighborhood, would have the side effect of giving me direct access to the nearest trolley station, meaning I could contemplate going car-free (which would be a great load off my finances).

But I don't want to force my body to lose further weight--I know all too well from the bad old days how that inevitably backfires. For one thing, that would involve further cutting my food intake--a bad idea for many reasons. I'm nominally at 1400 calories daily right now, and enlightened weight loss experts say going too much lower than that really messes with the metabolism in a counterproductive way. Plus,  while I'm comfortable enough on my current eating regimen, I am damn sure that I could not deal with restricting it any further--that would get the deprivation psycho-behavior going bigtime.

So, I think what I'll do for now is just keep on doing what I'm currently doing. Eventually my weight loss will gradually slow down, until it finally reaches equilibrium for my current levels of food intake and energy expenditure. Whatever weight that winds up being, will be my "goal weight." And when I reach that goal, I'll just continue to carry on with my food and activity the same as I've been doing all these months--only I'll start calling it maintenance mode instead of weight loss mode.

Zen "dieting" at its finest, no? Before the Enlightened Goal Weight, you chop veggies and carry water; after the Enlightened Goal Weight, you chop veggies and carry water. Works for me!

ScienceDaily: Changing To A Low-fat Diet Can Induce Stress

Link: ScienceDaily: Changing To A Low-fat Diet Can Induce Stress.

Aha! So that crazy manic craving thing that happens right after you start a severe "diet" may not just be "all in your head" ... or rather, it's in your head, but probably in a more hard-wired way than the lay public supposes. Once again, this is the kind of study that needs to be replicated before being accepted as gospel, but even so it's yet another pebble in the mountain of probability suggesting that the popular approach to "dieting" is doomed to backfire.

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: more evidence of changes

This week's numbers:

• Today's weight: 214.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 120.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.88

As I slowly continue to whittle away at the numbers, I find myself drifting into weight territory I haven't visited in years. For instance: I was leafing through my old copy of Making Peace With Food the other day, in the workbook sections of which I had scribbled various bits of data, and there I found a dated notation that proved I haven't weighed this little since the late 1980s. That's pretty freakin' mindblowing.

At some other point in the past week or so, I was leafing through some old files and found some photos of me that had been taken in 2002. Wow. I had completely blocked out how seriously huge I was. Mind you, there is no emotional charge on this observation--it's not like I was looking at the photos and thinking "How disgusting! Ellen, how could you have let yourself get so such-and-so?" or any such crap like that. I'm just plain old astonished at my former size. I must have been in denial--or to put a more neutral terminology on it, I think I took my size for granted the way we don't really think about air going in and out of our lungs--it's just there, you know?

But now that I'm getting used to seeing a significantly smaller me, that old photo is seriously startling. Some 340 pounds on a 5'3" frame is pretty damned hard to ignore. In the photos, I look like I'm almost as wide as I'm tall. God alone knows what kind of assumptions strangers must have made about me when looking at me. It's possibly a tribute to the strength of my personality that I had so many friends in my life who were able to look past all those layers of fat (and any prejudices they might have had about that) to see the real me.

Ironically, I'm sure at least some strangers looking at me today without any knowledge of my prior history would still think "oh, she's fat." No doubt some of them are even now making fatphobic assumptions that I must be a lazy careless slob in denial of her weight, who eats huge amounts of crap food while lolling about in front of the TV. And no doubt at least some will still be making such assumptions when I finally find a bottom weight, which I expect will leave me still significantly fatter than those impossibly thin models in the media. Oh well--like that silly old childhood aphorism says, "when you assume, you make an 'ass' of 'u' and 'me.'" Heh.

Yeah, sometimes I can still get a little cranky about the assumptions some people make. But mostly, I don't give a shit about the fatphobes, because I'm having so much fun enjoying the better health and functionality of my body as it currently is. I know I'm doing the right thing, and I feel gorgeous on the inside, where it really counts. And isn't that the real point, anyway?

How broccoli and soy fight cancer--a possible mechanism

Link: Why broccoli, soy fight cancer - Diet & Nutrition - MSNBC.com.

As usual, the news wire reporter has written an overoptimistic headline--this research finding still needs lots of followup. But there's no denying that it's a pretty intriguing finding:

"Using cells in a lab dish, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that diindolymethane (DIM), a compound resulting from digestion of cruciferous vegetables, and genistein, an isoflavone in soy, reduce the production of two proteins needed for breast and ovarian cancers to spread."

Fortunately, I loves me some cruciferous vegetables and soy products--got a bunch of broccoli and a tub of tofu in the fridge right now--so tanking on these foods is no burden, nomatter what the mechanism by which they do their voodoo.

Gallstone Risk Seen With Roche Weight Drug Xenical: FDA Staff

Link: Gallstone Risk Seen With Roche Weight Drug Xenical: FDA Staff.

I don't know which I'm more appalled by, the fact that this drug has been let loose on the diet-obsessed public, insufficiently investigated gallstone correlation and all, or the "oh by the way" fact dropped in this article that they're giving this drug to children.

This Xenical crap just sounds like bad news all around--yet another superfluous drug with which desperate fat people can torture themselves while lining the drug industry's pockets. And oh yeah, if you like that, you'll love its over-the-counter version with the adorable little-girl name "alli". This article says pretty much everything I could want to say on both those scores.

Crunchy knee part deux: tempting fate

So one of my favorite local bands, Rockola, had a gig on Wednesday night, and of course I could not resist going to hear them and dance my ass off.

As I think I've noted previously in this blog, one of the greatest joys of my weight loss adventure is regaining sufficient mobility and endurance to return to some fraction of the dance-floor monster I used to be in my teens and twenties. However, while the mobility and endurance have improved, there's some damage to my joints that have not, so I have to be careful or my dance-floor abandon can come at a painful price. And here I was, just a day after a particularly nasty run-in with the damage to my left knee.

Thus it was with a little trepidation that I headed on over to the club and hit the dance floor. But with a little care--making sure I wore my good supportive dance shoes, choosing to dance on the carpeted area next to the dance floor, rather than on the wood dance floor itself which always grabs my rubber soles putting hazardous torque on the knee joints--I was able to party on down for a goodly part of the evening with no apparent negative repercussions. Even today, two days after, I seem to have escaped reinjuring the knee.

Heh, now that I've typed this, just watch--I may have invoked the Fate Goddess to bitch-slap me for hubris! But ... well ... so far, so good ... I'll keep y'all posted if my knee does decide to go south again, but right now the cartilage crunchies seem to be in remission. And I had fun, and got in a huge slug of exercise too. So--yay!

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: crunchy knee! OW!

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 215.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 119.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.89

In the past week I've been once again trying to re-dedicate myself to the exercise part of my program. Mainly I've been concentrating on getting some walking in wherever and whenever I can, which has mostly been going excellently.

However, the importance of wearing the right footwear for even this casual effort was underlined today, when I chose to wear my cute little black leather clogs instead of my properly padded New Balance walking shoes. The clogs are supposed to be ergonomic too, but apparently not enough so, because after an afternoon browsing in a local 99 cent store and other errands, I came home just in time to have my left knee go out on me in a particularly painful fashion.

Usually when that knee bugs out, it's the meniscus tear--whatever little torn flap of cartilage is going on in there gets folded the wrong way, catching in the joint so that I can't fully straighten it. But this time the knee did its rarer and more painful bug-out mode, in which the knee cap somehow slides a little bit in the wrong direction, and suddenly there's vicious shooting pain between it and whatever bit of bone/tendon/stuff it's rubbing against.

Fortunately I was able to crawl into a nice hot bath, and eventually persuaded the kneecap to get back in its correct place and quit banging up against whatever. But before I got the kneecap to behave itself ... ow, did that ever hurt.

So ... yep, I should know better. And every time one of these little incidents happen, it's powerful negative reinforcement against the next time I'm tempted to wear the cute shoes instead of the super-comfy ones. Apparently, though, I'm a slow learner on this lesson, because I keep on coming back for yet another round of negative reinforcement. Oh well. I'm sure that, when I get tired of torturing myself that way, I'll stop making that mistake.

A day in the life, with food

Last Thursday somehow turned into a non-stop out-of-house experience from about 11:30am until well past midnight. So inevitably a lot of those thirteen hours happened around food eaten on the go.

To start with, for lunch I made a return visit to a restaurant I was about to write up for SanDiego.Eats.It, the  local dining website I freelance for. It being a Mexican restaurant, I was anticipating a major carb hit, and was already planning my day's food to accomodate that. I wound up having a fairly leisurely and fairly substantial lunch of a couple of veggie enchiladas in mole poblano, and some of the refried beans that came with--but not the rice which, while okay, was not quite exciting enough to waste any of my remaining carb allotment on.

I knew this meal would keep me going for several hours while I did errands, but around five I'd be hungry and needing to grab a quick dinner before a chorus sectional rehearsal at 6:30pm. But that dinner would need to be a salad or something else real light on the carbs, because I'd already blown my main stash of 'em on that lunch, and I wanted to save my little bonus stash of discretionary carbs for later that evening (more on that anon).

Five pm found me near my rehearsal site in Linda Vista, which is home to a Vietnamese neighborhood. I headed to a big Vietnamese supermarket I knew of in that area, which is surrounded by a bunch of little restaurants and other shops. Over in one corner I found one called Le's that served Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai, with a separate vegetarian menu. This intrigued me enough to get me through the door.

They did have an impressively long menu with many interesting items that I might yet go back and check out, but the thing my eye immediately gravitated to was som tam. This spicy shredded green papaya salad is one of my favorite ways to inhale a mass quantity of produce and love it. Seven bucks and change bought me a major hummock of the shredded stuff, with an only okay dressing with light heat, and halves of rather limp cooked fresh shrimp on top. But that mound of papaya still satisfied even under that relatively perfunctory treatment. Maybe if, the next time I come back, I gently inquire as to whether they can make it for me the way they make it to serve at home, with dried shrimp and some respectable heat.

Anyway, I'd gotten my bod sufficiently refueled to make it through my chorus rehearsal ... and then I was off to Pacific Beach to hear a gig one of my musician friends was playing--it happened to be the fabulous Mike Keneally, sitting in with The Playground Slap in a Garnet Street hole-in-the-wall tavern called the Tiki House.

This beer and wine only joint had Guinness on tap, and I had saved those discretionary carbs so I could have a pint, or even two if I wanted. I wound up just having the one. I'm not much of a beer drinker, but when I get in the mood for one I nearly always go for either a dark beer or a hefeweizen. What can I say? I like what I call "crunchy" beer. And beer has got enough real nutrition (such as a B vitamin bonanza from the brewer's yeast) that my bod willingly accepted this one as a late-evening snack.

And then I got home past midnight, to wind up waiting a half hour to pull the car into my apartment parking lot, because the entrance was blocked by cops dealing with some kind of auto mishap ... but that little whine is definitely off topic.

So anyway, with a little ingenuity and planning, I managed to make everything work out for me foodwise that day. And writing all of that out has made clear to me why I was so wiped out the following day--whew, a little too marathon, huh? Oh well ... it seemed a sensible plan at the time ...

A few quick simple veggie thrills

Okay, some of the following is so super-simple as to barely qualify for the category "Recipes", but hey, they work for me!

I picked up some super-cheap asparagus yesterday at a local Mexican market. I ate a few of the skinniest tenderest ones just as is, and put the rest on the Foreman grill, well lubricated with cooking spray. I actually let them cook a little longer than is the fashion nowadays, so that they were pretty soft--but I like 'em that way. Obviously if I've eaten some of the stalks raw, I have nothing against crunchy vegetables as such. But I also have a soft spot in my heart for vegetables cocked until they start getting tender, even a little creamy. With asparagus, that doesn't really take very long, so you have to watch so they don't shoot right past to overdone even by soft-cooked veg fan standards.

Recently I've been really getting into raw radishes, both the Western small round red ones and the big honkin' Japanese daikon. The latter really work great as a dip vehicle--just slice one crosswise into thin discs or "chips". The former are fun to snack on whole--it's admittedly harder to dip them, but still doable if you're determined!

I've made a really spicy pungent dipping sauce for these and other veggies out of a couple of cubes of red chile-seasoned fermented bean curd, along with a little bit of the oil/brine from the fu yu bottle. Major umami enrichment for all of that roughage.