I've had a productive couple weeks, attending to a long list of to-dos I'd been avoiding for ages. I applied for deferments, forbearances, and other sorts of formal pleading with my lenders to get my student loan debt dealt with, at least for the time-being. I wrote ad copy for my listing on the Psychology Today website. I went through a huge stack of paperwork, billing statements, and receipts that had been sitting around for months waiting to be processed, paid, recycled, or otherwise dealt with. In fact, I went through about four such stacks. I cleared out from my files any financial records more than seven years old.(Fascinating, the kinds of relics you find when you clear out old files. I happened upon the above bank statement from when I was a member of the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union a decade ago, announcing the local area code change from 408 to 831, devastating to me, a lifelong denizen of the 408 until then.)

Hmm, what else did I manage to do? Ooh, I thoroughly dusted Astrid's bedroom, since she's been sneezy lately, and cleared out a junk drawer to help make more room for her voluminous t-shirt collection. Next major project will be counting up my therapy hours for the BBS, a chore I will continue to dread periodically for the next two or four years.

I have no idea where this sudden spurt of organizational energy has come from. Maybe it's related to eating healthier? It feels really great to get all that shit taken care of though, putting things in order that have been chaotic for months, years. I like paring down the details, and therefore the amount of worrying I do about said details. Makes life a little more peaceful.

Sigh

I ate everything in sight last night. What was in sight, you ask?

- steak
- fried potatoes
- fresh strawberry pie
- cheese cake. Need I go on?

My bike is in the shop. Once I have it back, I'm gonna ride that thing like there's no tomorrow. I'm thinking there might be no way to change permanently the way I eat. But I can always incorporate more physical activity into my life. We'll see how this fares.

Regimen Anew!

Alright. Back to the drawing board again. I weighed myself this morning, and I'm now 227 pounds, a full 7 more than when I started this blog, and about 12 pounds more than my top reasonably-comfortable weight of 215. Still not the heaviest I've ever been (which would be 235) but way too much, nonetheless. I'm bursting out of all me britches, and this can't stand. So today, I start fresh. No judgments, no guilt, just a healthier plan for eating and upping the weekly biking/walking mileage. I'm still really ambivalent about giving up the gym membership, even though I haven't been regularly using it for months. Mainly, the excercize is going to continue to come from biking, which means more miles from commuting and pleasure rides. Now that summer's gearing up, I really have no excuses for not doing it.

So, the food. Repetative as this is, I need to re-articulate, to myself and the world, I guess, what my regimen will be:

* Less meat - particularly less fatty and cured meats. Lean meats and fatty fish are fine. In fact, I'm trying to get better about Omega-3 fish oil supplements as well. Fish is the protein source I've been shortchanging myself on the most since Astrid became a vegetarian, and I'm not sure why. Need to eat more of it.

* Less eggs and cheese - though not total elimination. Mostly, I want to reduce the number of egg yolks I eat in a week.

* Indefinite moratorium on deep-fried foods (good bye chicken strips and french fries, for now at least)

* Way more fresh veggies and fruit

* Way less simple refined carbs (white breads, pastries, et al)

* Less refined sugars, or almost total elimination. I may continue a regular small square of dark chocolate, but otherwise, gotta ween.

* More whole grains to replace refined carbs.

* Slightly less alcohol, but not too concerned about this one, as my drinking is pretty controlled already.

* More agua.

Ambivalent about Ambivalence

It's been about, well, pretty much exactly, a year since I started this blog (among the proliferation of blogs I feel somehow compelled to maintain). I've only written about 20 entries, though, and I'm wondering if I'll continue to be vigilant and brave enough to keep this one up. I'm toying with the idea of re-posting my AFG entries over at Toothpick Labeling and just making the weight/health issue part of the umbrella of that main blog. There's a way in which it feels kind of compartmentalized over here by its lonesome, and I fear that my physical health is already over-compartmentalized in reality; it doesn't serve me to virtually wall it off as well. On the other hand, giving the subject of my weight, the state of my diet and exercise, and the emotional issues all tied up therein, its own forum, free from the clutter of other obsessions (relationships, trivial nonsense, the daily grind, et al) may be only proper for allowing myself the space to explore the space I take up.

All this to say, I haven't written anything here since Thanksgiving, and now it's fucking March, 2009, and I weigh about 6-7 pounds more than I did this time last year when I started this thing and declared that I wanted to lose a bit of weight. What has happened in the last year?

- I started this blog, in an effort to become more mindful about this topic in my life.

- I joined a gym and got into a fairly regular exercise regimen for, say, about three months. Guess what: the last time I went to the gym and the last time I blogged here were roughly the same day, marked by the annual turkey feast of gluttony.

- I've been biking way less than I was, when compared with my biking of two to three years ago. This mostly owes to the changes in my daily schedule that were brought on by being in grad school, and then my internship starting, and then my grad program transferring to a very un-bike-friendly location, and then three out of the last six months being both unemployed (read: unmotivated and depressed) and kind of soggy outside. And, oh, my bike broke and I went about a month to two months without one.

- my patellofemoral syndrome is really acting up lately, and my whole body feels out of whack. (In addition my my left knee, I'm feeling chronic dull discomfort in my left hip, lower back aches, neck stiffness, and occasional tingling in my right shoulder/arm which seem to be related to the back and neck tightness.) All these physical ills would improve with more exercise, even if I don't lose any weight.

- Less work = less money, which means I can't go to a chiropractor for the above issues.

- Less money theoretically should mean an upturn toward healthier eating, since Astrid and I have been cooking at home more. And we got gifted six months of the organic box delivery, so we've had a load of fresh veggies in the house, too. The other piece of this is that Astrid went vegetarian in July, so we've been cooking way less meat in the house, though I still do when I'm on my own for some meals. I don't know if the net impact of all this is that I'm eating better or not. The jury's still out.

So it hasn't all been bad, it's just been a lot to handle emotionally in the last year, and eating too much is my big coping mechanism, so there you go. Hmm...that makes me think that keeping this blog alive for a while may yet help me, in that I can always shoot out a quick entry instead of grabbing the chips and salsa.

Anyway, guess I'll keep AFG around. There are a number of topics I'm tossing around for possible future entries; I just have to motivate myself. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks for reading...if you're still out there!

Fried Food Frenzy

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. Except that I'm not Catholic, and my father is dead, so I don't think he would mind that I've had chicken strips, french fries, and breaded, fried cauliflower today (eating this last delicacy as I type before you now.) Yes, all in one day. Maybe this has to do with my vegetarian girlfriend being out of town, thus I'm eating to alleviate my missing her, and eating decadent meaty things 'cause, really, I just can. It feels wonderful momentarily and then feels awful, physically, not long after such binges. I should really be asleep now, but this cauliflower is fucking tasty.

Does it exonerate me when you know that I breaded the cauliflower in matzo meal?

Sometimes I do; sometimes I don't

We did a check-in during class tonight, in which we were supposed to share something about self-care: where it's at for us right now, what we want to be mindful of for ourselves as we engage in our clinical work and return to classes after the ordeal we've been through (see the other blog if you don't know the ordeal to which I refer.) I talked about how I'm taking multi-vitamins and fish oil supplements now, which I'm truly happy about. But it was a veneer to mask the real thing I'm not doing to care for myself: I'm nowhere near where I want to be in terms of eating healthfully. That couple-week stretch of eating well has given way to the usual pattern of eating satisfying but non-nutritive crap and eating too much of it. Sigh. Then my amazing new teacher told us she recently joined Weight Watchers. I didn't have a negative reaction to this because, A., my teacher is fierce and serene in the best combination of those qualities, and even said she could facilitate WW meetings better than their group leaders, fat and all! and B., WW is actually the one diet plan in the whole universe of the $40 billion diet industry that doesn't turn my stomach, so to speak, because it's actually a way for people to learn how to eat balanced, healthy meals and change their eating habits. So anyway, this isn't an ad for WW, but it's just to say that, damn, I didn't use that opportunity to be "out" about my contemplation of losing weight and my struggle to eat healthier.

On the flip side, I was the only one in class who commuted by bike, and that's something I can be pretty proud of, even if I ate a can of Chicken and Stars soup upon arriving home. ;)

Bad Week with Food

The stress has let up somewhat, though I've got a lot of clinic work right now, and school starting up. So there's that. And the fact that I just ate a whole mini cheesecake, even though I wasn't hungry in the slightest. It looks like one serving, but it's really two, or maybe even three. Sigh. It was really fucking tasty, though. Like some of the best cheesecake ever, all velvety and lemony, with a bottom graham crust that tasted more like carmelized butter and sugar than a box of stale crackers.

I had some time to kill tonight before Dax's birthday celebration, so I ducked into a wifi café in Berkeley before heading to the pub, and there's a problem with me and cafés, see: I love 'em, but I don't drink coffee. So here I am with this gorgeous display of pastries and confections in a curved glass case in front of me, and these beautiful tiny cheesecakes staring up at me, needing a tummy to fill. Okay, you know it's bad when I start anthropomorphizing food. So, yeah, I bought it, I ate it, and now I feel really yucky. And now I'm on my way to drink beer on top of it.

Half a Corned Beef Sandwich

I could count the times I've eaten just half a sandwich on one hand. As a rule, I'm not good at leaving food on the plate. If there ever were a Jack Sprat's wife, she'd be me. Except for the being someone's wife thing. And the having no name except my husband's thing. And the being in a nursery rhyme thing.

You know what I mean; I can eat no lean.

So tonight, I ate at an old favorite in Berkeley, Saul's, a Jewish-style deli on Shattuck Avenue. It's a place N. and I used to go frequently, and I don't even remember whether I've been there since we broke up over three years ago. I went there after work at the clinic with my co-worker Devra. I ordered a cup of matzo ball soup and a "6-ounce" corned beef sandwich on rye. The sandwich came with a choice of cole slaw (yuck!), potato salad (meh), french fries (danger! danger!) or salad. I went with the salad. So the soup, salad, and half a sandwich were exactly enough food for me. I knew I didn't need to eat the second half, so I didn't.

I will make a minor complaint about the corned beef at Saul's: while I love that they use Niman Ranch sustainably raised, hormone-free beef, lending a very Berkeley feel to the New York style food, the truth is, and this is the kicker, it's too lean. Even Jack Sprat knows that corned beef should be juicy and fatty and lip-smackingly rich.

(*okay, so I am someone's wife. Sheesh, don't be such a stickler!)

I love my shrink

I've never blogged about my therapist before. I've mentioned being in therapy, but never anything specific about Mark, my dude. He is so light-hearted and takes my issues seriously but helps me create a relaxed, nonjudgmental space to contemplate them and start letting stuff go. Last week I went into therapy totally down on myself for how I've been eating lately. With everything going on with school, and the new bookkeeping job, I've been so fucking stressed out and eating everything in sight. I cried on the couch, feeling huge and awful and shitty. Mark basically told me to chill out and give myself some credit for coping with the stress. Since eating is one of my self-soothing strategies, it's not surprising that that's where I go when I'm freaked out. We talked about what I might do in the next week to stay grounded, and it totally calmed me down. I've been eating really healthfully all week, and feel bunches better. Just being reminded not to beat up on myself was really the key. Once I felt freer to cope by eating, and became more mindful of it and accepting of it, I wanted to do it less.

What It's About

(The first Ambivalent Fat Girl entry.)

By way of introduction, I am a fat dyke in my mid-30s, living a beautiful life in San Francisco. I'm shacked up with a really swell lady and I'm currently a grad student in clinical psychology. My academic and professional interests swim around such issues as death, sitting with the unknown, existential anxiety, body image issues, fatness, fat positivity, health and well-being, sexuality, queer/GLB identity, gender variance, genderqueer and transgender identity issues, spirituality, finding meaning in life, and yadda yadda. For fun, I like listening to music (mostly of the post-punk, folkie, political, artsy, nerdy-emo indie variety) riding my bike, lazing about, blogging, being social, drinking gorgeous cocktails, and more often than not, eating lots of yummy food.



I've been fat my whole life. I'm 5'4" and I currently weigh around 220 pounds. I've weighed as much as 235, but in the last few years, I've stayed pretty consistently between 210 and 220, most often lingering at exactly 215. I weighed 210 at the end of high school, so my weight's been fairly steady over the last 18 years.

My feelings about my weight yo-yo a bit more than that, to be true, thus with the "ambivalence." After growing up with a lot of anxiety and unhappiness about my weight, in an unforgiving fatphobic culture, with a mom (whom I adore, by the way) who constantly dieted and modeled body self-hatred for me, coming into my own sensibility about my weight involved everything from internalizing the self-hatred to rejecting the paradigm and refusing to get on a scale for more than ten years. Back in high school, I ate like absolute shit. Taco Bell, Denny's, everything fried, crispy and golden brown. I still love me some chicken strips. Moving my body as little as possible was a matter of true slacker pride. In college I went vegetarian for three years and lost a bit of weight that way, but I can't say I was eating much healthier, really. It wasn't until about five years ago that I started exercising, and now I totally dig getting myself around by bike. I actually enjoy working up a sweat, even. So since biking entered my life, and a new consciousness around healthy eating has crept slowly into my routine, things have shifted for me a bit. I'm still a chronic overeater, and tend to indulge my cravings too often, so despite an overall healthier lifestyle, I really haven't experienced a significant net weight loss. Sometimes I feel okay about that, and sometimes I don't.

I experience some health problems which I feel to be related to my weight and to overeating. My knees are stressed and weak, and I had a bad case of patello-femoral syndrome for a couple years, which still affects me, but has lessened some since doing physical therapy and getting more exercise. I can't squat or spend too much time kneeling, or else the knees crack and pop in a very unpleasant way. I've had a low-grade but chronic struggle with acid reflux, which I'm quite sure is caused mainly by overeating, and has diminished some since quitting coffee about four years ago or so. My overall and long-term health would be much improved if I were to dramatically cut back on saturated fats (main culprits: red meat and all things fried) and if I were to make a habit out of eating til satisfied and not until utterly stuffed. Though I'm a fan of salty snacks which carry their own kinds of risks (raising blood pressure and water retention) I will say I'm not much of a sweet tooth. A small square of chocolate is a totally doable limit for me, but get me near a bowl of briny green olives, and the lot of 'em will be gone before you can say "bowl of briny green olives."

It's also noteworthy that since getting into biking, I realize that if I weighed less, I would actually have more endurance and be able to bike faster and farther. Climbing the San Francisco hills is a painful and slow undertaking for me, and if I weighed even twenty pounds less, I think my biking efficiency would be vastly improved, not to mention my stamina and energy for lots of other fun stuff like sex and walking and um, sex.

So I'm inaugurating this here blog with an admission that I'm making quite public. I'm interested in losing some weight. Even as a fat-positive feminist anti-establishment dyke, I have come to understand that for my own body, for my own lifestyle, and for my own long-term health goals, this makes sense for me. I don't know if I'll be successful. I don't know if I'll be any "happier" if I weigh less. I don't know whether, even if I lose a significant amount of weight, I will keep it off or not. I just dunno. But I want to blog the progress, the literal ups & downs, and mostly the fleeting thoughts, feelings, fears, and myopic obsessions that run through this noggin when anything related to these topics floats on through. Welcome to the contradictory journey.

Please feel free to leave comments, but if you flame me for being a "fat hater" I will have to lash you roundly. Also, if you leave inane fatphobic comments like, "Oh my god, you'll look so much better when you're skinny!" I'll also have to lash you. My feelings about this subject are ambivalent for very complex personal, political, cultural and healh-related reasons. In this blog, I am attempting to be as honest as I can about my mixed feelings on weight loss, what is at stake for me emotionally, how I've been conditioned to hate myself and other fat people, and how wanting to lose weight is mired in all kinds of problematic socio-cultural ideologies, prejudices, and power relationships. In other words, I know. Don't judge me for being human, please.

Peace, y'all.

Bree