Isn't This Lovely?

Just out of curiosity, I entered the words "Beautiful" and "Fat" into Google's Image Search Engine to see what would come up.  I figured it would be a fairly accurate reflection of societal mindset and it seemed to be.  I got a good mix of shar pei puppies, magazines with titles like "Big'uns" and such.  One thing that really caught my eye was this drawing of a fairy that reflects beautiful what I consider to be an average shaped woman.  I was so impressed that I wrote to the artist, Deborah Dixon, to ask permission to print her picture here.  For more of her wonderful work, be sure and go to her website at http://flyingparty.com/trolls/troll.html for more of her wonderful work.  She's a really neat person and is wonderfully talented.  

I wish we could flood the market with pictures like this and of Emme, (left) who is a very lovely and very successful full figured model.  It would be great if we could retrain the public eye to accept beauty in what is achievable to the average woman as opposed to what can only be accomplished through starvation and hours of working out every day with a personal trainer, if even then.  I'm sure you've all seen the net-e-mailing going around for years with tidbits on it about how if Barbie was a real woman, she'd have to walk on all fours due to her proportions and Marilyn Monroe was a size 14-16.  It used to be accepted as voluptuous and desirable, but as we have pushed the envelope more and more, we've reached a point that society's view of "beautiful" can only be accomplished by approximately 4% of American women.  Is that sad or what??  It renders the rest of us to the category of unacceptable or benign at best and worst I shouldn't even discuss!  

Anyway, I was exceptionally pleased to find this little fairy and I'm grateful to Ms Dixon for putting such a beautiful picture out there.  

For myself, I'm seeing incredible luck and I'm extremely please with the results.  I started on Atkins induction and Hydroxycut the Thursday before Thanksgiving...what was that? (see entry below)  November 21, so I'm two days away from three weeks.  I've lost 11 pounds so far and I'm pleased that it's obvious (to me anyway) that it really is fat that I'm losing.  I have elbows!  Pointy ones!  :)  It's been easier than I expected, but there have been some moments of really missing the potatoes and especially the bread.  I went off of Atkins for this past weekend and didn't over-indulge.  I didn't gain anything as a result, which was pleasing.  

This week, I'm starting the exercise portion of it, so we'll see what that does.  It's going great!!

Love,

November 29, 2002
1am or so

Don't worry.  Your eyes will adjust (and recover).  It's dark out (and it's dark within), so I felt like going dark for a while.  Oh yes, the Fatastic Journal is back, for as long as it is to be this time, whatever that is.  I had to laugh as I looked back over the entries (so few!) since I first started it almost 2 years ago.  Sometimes, it feels like I've been fighting this battle forever.  I think that's part of the problem is that for so long it's felt like a fight when I just didn't have any fight left in me.  I didn't want to be at war with my own body when I was already having to take up the sword in so many other areas of my life.  

What happened when I signed a peace treaty with the body and decided to revere it rather than revile it, whether fat or firm, is that I found complete peace with where I am in the process, which in the past few weeks has been "gaining."  I don't know if that has been a blessing or a curse because I feel beautiful and I feel sexy and I feel alive and I feel healthy!  I'm not one of these people who is manic about being "fat" at 130.  I mean, I'm genuinely a fat woman and there is no debate over that.  I just feel good and I haven't much felt a need to change.  I'm only doing it now because last month, the Universe started poking at me to do it in a number of ways and I've learned not to ignore pokes lest they turn into bludgeonings.  I'm doing this with little to no motivation or interest other than the fact that I was told to do it.

Well, that's not altogether true, I suppose.  I *started* doing it because I was told to do so.  Now, I'm getting a little more motivated because oddly, I'm seeing results and I seldomly did before without major, gasping effort that left me on bended knee in soul-felt thanks for every single pound that dropped.  Now, I could basically care less and it seems to be working.  

I'm still using Hydroxycut and a modified Atkins diet.  I take the Hydroxycut twice a day (2 caps) and I take a multivitamin in the morning.  I'm staying to the 20 grams of carbohydrates or less a day on most days.  I did take off for Thanksgiving, not because I was craving like mad or anything, but because I chose to have a piece of pumpkin pie.  

I weighed in on Wednesday, 6 days into the diet.  I wasn't going to weigh or measure at all since I don't want to be ruled by the numbers on the scale or have a "good" day or a "bad" day based on what they say.  Both on the first day and on Wednesday, I weighed in the morning, post-pee, pre-eat.  Wow!  Down 5 pounds AND it was 2-3 days before my period!  Not bad!  Of course, on Atkins you lose water weight that the tissues were holding, but hey!  I'm happy to lost water weight!  My clothes really are getting looser and I can feel muscle in my legs where I couldn't before.  Maybe indifference will be the critical element to weight loss plans in the future!

I'm very handicapped in the Atkins diet because I don't care for many green veggies and pretty much have to keep it to celery, lettuce, cabbage and green beans.  I don't like cheese unless it's melted onto something else (read:  carb), so that's another avenue that's closed.  I do like eggs quite a lot and I like the way the meat and salads fill me up.  It's nice not to feel hungry, between the Hydroxycut and the Atkins.

I haven't been exercising just yet, but plan to get started with Yoga, walking on the treadmill and Body Flexing.  I've had great results for any of the three in the past and enjoy them all.  The biggest challenge has been making time for it.  By the time I stop doing family stuff, it's usually late enough at night that I'm whipped and not really thinking much about exercising.  I am not really open to getting up an hour or so before the kids wake up to do it because Nathan is usually up around 4:30-5:00am and even that's too early for an old woman like me.  It'll come.  I'm expecting to start in the early evening this week.   Eric is always more than willing to watch the kids while I do it.  I just haven't pushed for it yet.

The toughest thing about this experience with weight loss is that within just a couple of days of changing how I eat, the blues came on and brought the mood swings with them.  It was very easy to quickly pinpoint where it was coming from, but that doesn't really fix it much.  For so long now, food has been about the only "fun" thing I can do that is just for me.  It's quick, it's nurturing, it's gratifying and it numbs my need for adult-based entertainment.  I pretty much take care of kids all of the time and there are two ways I've "rewarded" myself for being a good mom.  One is with food and the other is with shopping (inexpensive thrift shop stuff, not the Dr Phil women who have boxes of crap in their closet or garage that still have the tags).  Since the Summer of Poverty hit (and it's almost in the rear view mirror, yayyyy!!), I haven't been able to splurge much financially, so when the diet it, the last frontier of fun disappeared.  Whenever I'm writing for the site, it's either the dead of night when the last kid has finally fallen asleep (like now), or else I'm juggling kids all over my back, getting up literally every 2-3 minutes from what I'm writing, losing all train of thought and trying to get the train back in the station when I can sit back down again.  It takes me hours just to write a few paragraphs sometimes.  I do it, the writing AND the mothering, because I love it, but I very much miss having personal time when I'm awake and lucid to write.  Reading (as in a book) is almost an impossibility.  I have a TBR stack (to be read) that is ready to be converted into 2 stacks before the first one falls over.  I love it when someone says, "You should write a book."  I always wonder, "When?"  Other than the ones I've written on Paganism and the Tarot, there are about 3-4 others that I've written 20-30 times...in my head!  Lord knows I couldn't make them cohesive in print in this environment!  I know it will be very different in a couple of years when Nathan goes to kindergarten for several hours a day.  Then I'll have a wide open window for writing.  Until then, the frustration of not being able to do it wars loudly with the intellectual knowledge that it must not yet be time or it'd be happening.  

So where I was going with that is that the eating was something I could do in a moment and feel satisfied.  It is something very personal and private, even if you are eating in public. YOU are the one tasting it and processing the sensations of eating it and you don't really ever share that with anyone because their experience eating the same food will be different.  A friend of mine, who was a psychologist and a "sexologist" (I didn't know those existed until I met him, but I reckon they do!) once commented to me that no matter who they are with at the time, a person is alone when they orgasm.  My first reaction was, "Hmm.  I'm not quite sure that you're doing it right then, bud" because I've had some fairly soul-uniting, rainbow flying, body sharing orgasms before.  I can see where he's coming from and also apply it to food.  When you eat, even in a crowd, the experience is personal enough that you are alone.  I think I eat to be alone and to have an experience that is only mine.  In my life, it feels like I have to share almost everything else.

Without that crutch, the full wretchedness of my life has come into focus.  OK, well, maybe that was a bit harsh, but suffice it to say that I've been able to see how little I have going on for me and how much I have going on for other people. I know that I rebel against it sometimes.   If I'm feeling particularly non-nurtured, I reward myself by not cleaning the house for a couple of days, just lying around in comfy clothes, watching TV, cuddling the kids and moving only if required.  My theory is that if no one else is going to nurture me, I'm going to do it myself.  It doesn't go over well, as you can imagine, and Mr Scorpio with Virgo rising comes home grumbling after the second day or so.  

This tells me that if I can just arrange myself so that I can get some fun into my life (I don't think a housekeeper is forthcoming any time soon) and have more things going on for me that feel like a reward or luxury, I will be more willing to let go of the food.  I've still let it go now as my crutch, but it's been a tough way to go when I don't have anything else to lean on.  Sadly, I must have been royalty in a past life because I just LOVE to be pampered and doted on and fawned over and nurtured and even more sadly, I always wait for it expectantly, only to find out that I've been stood up (again).  Sage is great at it, but he's far away and can't be around all the time.  It's wonderful when he can come up and I get my Sage fix and I know Eric relaxes a lot when he sees that someone who is nonthreatening is doing for me what he can't.  What sucks about that is that it's like dying of thirst and having someone rub your lips with water and let a bit dribble down your throat.  I have to find a way to get this kind of thing on an ongoing basis.  My cup is dry, there're dust bunnies blowing around in it and a line of people forming to take a big swig (then they guzzle and go back around to the end of the line again)!  If I can find a way to do this, I can have more of me and a better me to give to everyone else in my life.  I know it shouldn't be this difficult of a puzzle!

Poor Eric is impossible to talk to about it.  His responses are usually anything from, "I know your life sucks and I wish it was better" (My life doesn't really SUCK. In fact, my life is pretty awesome.  It's just this one thing I need to fix) to "You're going to have to just accept that what is, is and stop whining about it!"  As you can tell, it depends on his mood and how long we've been discussing it.  I have to catch him in quick bursts.  

Men don't do words well, I've learned.  One of them that I hadn't spoken to for a long while recently remarked 3 times in one e-mail about how long-winded and "verbose" I am.  Pfft.  I loved what Christiane Northrup (aka "Goddess) said about women vs men in this department.  She was remarking on the statistics (which I have forgotten) on the number of words men speak in a day compared to the number of words women speak in a day.  It's something ridiculous (but fully believable) like men speak 200 words and women speak 20,000 words.  She said her husband would become extremely agitated with her for how long she took to explain or tell something.  In frustration, he blurted out, "Can you POSSIBLY say that in fewer words???"  

She replied, "No I cannot.  And this is why..."

That is so...me. 

And with that, I'm ending the christening or rechristening of the Fatastic Journal and I'm going to go try to sleep.  Eric says he's going to nurture me by getting up with the little ones tomorrow morning and letting me sleep in, so we'll see how that goes!

Take care!