As a child, I recall that the fat on the steak was my very
favorite part. Somewhere around the age of 8 or 9, though, I began to learn
that I shouldn’t eat the fat. That it would make me fat.
That I was fat. At
first these admonitions were said gently, and with wisdom. But later, they felt
like digs into the very core of my being. I remember, once, helping myself to a
second helping of tuna salad, and I heard my Mother say, “Do you just want to
be fat your whole life?” The level of disgust in her voice frightened me, and the
humiliation felt like ice in my stomach. I had only wanted a little more
tuna.
It had tasted so delicious.
Little did she or I know that it wasn’t the fat, tuna, or the
mayonnaise that was the problem, it was the bread, and the sugar in the
mayonnaise and the relish. But that memory has stood the test of time. I sometimes hear the shriekish way it was
said to me when I see my own daughters fixing food. I worry that I’ve projected my own body image
issues onto my oldest daughter, who has already heard criticism from her peers.
Sure, she has a little tummy, but she is growing, and will likely grow nearly
12 inches in the next several years. She devours vegetables, and chile, and all sorts of amazing foods that most kids would turn their nose up to. Chicken tenders were never her thing. Hot salsa, stir fry, and green chile stew, those were the things she ate as a toddler. She will start bleeding and will learn to
live with her blood moon. She is strong, graceful, lovely. Her legs are to die
for.
I am thankful that she is not in school so that the critics
are far and few between. I am thankful that she is enamored with dance and
soccer and swimming and running, and that we can provide her with opportunities
that I did not have; that my own parents refused to give to me.
I have struggled with my own body image for as long as I can
remember. Growing up with mostly
Hispanic and Indian girls, I was immediately and obviously different. More
pudgy, more blond, more blue-eyed than most everyone else. My hispanic friends were ridiculously skinny
and much more leggy than I could ever dream of.
I wished for dark brown or black hair, and would look at my wet hair
after a bath and wish it would stay darker and not dry into the wheat-blond
locks I was, actually, blessed with.
In the fourth grade, one particularly ruthless boy named
Ruben started calling me Chubby Checker.
I didn’t know who Chubby Checker was, other than some old guy that the characters
on Happy Days mentioned from time to time.
In fifth grade, the boy both my best friend and I both had a crush on, Bryan,
said he liked me because I had a “chunky pussy.” Yes, really. As much as I did not feel like
that was a compliment, I was happy he liked me. By sixth grade, when I was 11,
it was clear that me and my gringa friends were developing at a different rate
than our Hispanic sisters. We had more boobs
and were much taller, me being much wider, while they all still had legs the
circumference of the fourth graders, just taller.
By middle school, everyone seemed to catch up. I wasn’t fat
or skinny, just average. But by high
school, my weight again became a prominent factor in my own life. I wanted desperately to do sports like
swimming or diving and track, but my parents told me I could only do band,
which was “enough” of an obligation for me. When my weight began to climb at
age 14, my mother brought a nutritionist in to meet with me. She concurred that I was too heavy for my age
and height. She proceeded to instruct me
on measuring out my morning cereal, one-half cup of raisin bran, and one cup of
skim milk. Ick. By 10:00 am,
I distinctly remember feeling brain-fogged and starving, thinking that lunch
time was an eternity away. I lost about
10 pounds and the nutritionist fell by the wayside.
A meager allowance meant that my friends and I could cross
the street to the little market and buy Oreos and smoked almonds for lunch
every day. Some days I existed on diet
coke and peanut butter chocolate wafers, with a serving of peanut M&Ms
during French.
When I was 14 I had strep several times. I had the chicken
pox. I had regular common colds multiple times. I would get bloody noses every
single day. Sometimes it took an hour to make them stop bleeding. As a result of the multiple colds I had, I
bought nasal spray to unblock my congested sinuses, which surely only helped to
erode the tender mucosa that lined the inside of my nose. My hormones were
running rampant and I was cursed to fall in love with guys over and over.
Somehow I managed to maintain my aura of normalcy, but I remember feeling
anything but, deep down inside.
My Mother’s overwhelming domineering control and her
unspoken fear that I would end up pregnant and destitute at age 14, became
all-encompassing. She went through my stuff, she read my journal, she grounded
me for 6 months. All just for being a normal 14-year old. As the year wore on,
and my diet became worse and worse, it is remarkable that I was able to survive
the endless stream of diet cokes, peanut butter bars, M&Ms, and Oreos. Surely it was my Mom’s insistence on the
home-cooked meat or fish-based dinners that salvaged my poor brain.
At 16, I discovered that my tall, blond, gorgeous friend,
Wendy, was a foodie. She would insist on
bringing me to her house for lunch where she would fix me leftover cheese
ravioli with pesto, or leftover chicken parmesan from the night before. She told me she enjoyed cooking because it
was her job to do so, to take care of her sisters because her Mother didn’t do
so, since she was a doctor. I envied her
skill at whipping us up a lunch from the remains of the fridge.
By 17, I would eat my lunch with my boyfriend every day, so
I pre-made my lunch the night before, eating mostly sandwiches and fruit, but
sometimes leftover hamburgers or my Dad’s famous beef teriyaki. When I first started dating my future hubby,
I was a large 160 pounds. I remember
thinking that my ass was one of the widest in school. Another dear friend, with a matter-of-fact
way of being told me, “Who cares? Why do you care?” And I couldn’t come up with an immediate
answer. Why did I care if my ass was wider than everyone else’s? Well, obviously I cared because I wanted to
be skinny, and pretty, and desired.
That’s why I cared.
When I started dating Scott, he tortured me. It became clear that to be his girlfriend I
would have to be active, which was enjoyable as a child, but I had clearly had
fallen into ill-repair as noted on the first bike ride we did together. I felt
like I was going to die. My legs could
not even push the bicycle up Urban, or back to his parent’s house on Arizona.
The first several hikes we took made my lungs feel like they would implode, and
I would beg to stop and rest constantly. He must have really liked me. He was patient and gentle and never
criticized, ever.
I joined Tae Kwon Do, I started running regularly. I bought
a mountain bike.
My life had just begun.
At age 19, I visited my first alternative practitioner, Jeff
Santay. He diagnosed me as being sensitive to wheat and dairy. I attempted to
learn how to eat without eating crackers and bread and tortillas and milk, and
it was incredibly difficult as a poor college student living in the city. I
bought rice-bread and natural hot dogs and ate a lot of carne adovada.
Eventually my desire to maintain the food elimination became
too difficult because I was young, in college, and didn’t have much money or
motivation. We ended back up in Washington,
this time in our own house near the water. Our year in Albuquerque
had introduced us to stir fries and the organic food co-op. Back in Olympia
we discovered we could eat on $30 a week by shopping at the co-op. Fresh vegetables, salmon, and fruit were
purchased there, and we’d buy our cheese, canned goods, and beer at the
super-store, Top Foods, where fresh Halibut was sometimes on sale for pennies.
We lived next to an organic bakery, and could buy day-old bread for
next-to-nothing.
Bicycle commuting, running, Tae Kwon Do, swimming, Aikido,
and dance meant that I was burning plenty of calories, despite our regular
consumption of beer and fresh-baked bread.
I was the lightest I had ever been as an adult those last two years at
Evergreen, weighing between 125 and 130 pounds.
And I still thought I was fat.
I look at pictures now and think, what the heck was I
thinking? I was beautiful!
And as I’ve aged, I’ve watched my weight slowly and surely
continue to climb and climb up through the numbers. Despite maintaining a heavy exercise load, my
hormones could not keep up with the carbohydrate-heavy days I funneled into my
body. Four to six beers a day, quesadillas, pasta salads, cheese and crackers,
home made pizza—all these things overloaded my insulin receptors and sent my
brain on a desperate search for hormonal communication between my receptors and
my cells.
Despite my home-cooked soups and stews, sautéed greens, casseroles,
stir-fried meals, consciousness towards fresh, organic, whole foods, I was
still just getting fatter and fatter. Year after year. If my hours of exercise dropped, my weight
would climb faster. If I increased my biking or running loads, I would only
stabilize, not lose. Despite being an herbal practitioner who helped others to
regain health and well-being, I felt like I could not grasp hold of my own
well-being when it came to my weight.
And as much as I knew I was fat and getting fatter, felt my own
embarrassment in the fact that my clothes were getting tighter and tighter, and
that I did not look like the athlete I think myself to be, I didn’t know what
to do other than what I was already doing.
Trying to eat well, and exercise a lot. I was, in fact,
resigning myself to the idea that I was just one of those people who is
big. That I was big-boned, stocky,
Scandinavian. I am strong, I told myself, when it comes to kicking someone’s
ass in a self-defense situation, I want the weight behind my kick. I can go
longer and farther than most people, I would tell myself. There is a lot of
muscle under that upholstery.
But I was still selling myself short. I was not looking
myself in the eye. I was not being honest.
I knew that the primary problem was beer, and my
over-consumption of it. Thousands of
calories a month. Thousands of grams of carbohydrates.
But the more that I’ve learned that calories in/calories out
is not accurate, I’ve come to see that it was my constant glycemic loading--the
continuous pumping in of carbohydrates that my body could only deal with by
storing them as fat. And that the more carbs I pumped in, whether from beer or
grains or beans, the more metabolic disruptions I continued to cause. Slowly
and surely, I was headed down the pathway of metabolic disorder, and eventual
type II diabetes. As much as I proclaimed to know about health and well-being,
I was headed down my own personal road to disaster.
Many pathways led me to this moment. I am thankful for each one. I now know that I
do not have to be resigned to being fat. After more than a decade of not being
able to lose 5 pounds to save my life (minus and plus the 17 pounds I lost with
soup and hours of spinning, cycling, and running—over the course of 9 months,
and then regained in a matter of weeks), I have lost over 34 pounds in 4
months. The effort did not come from exercise and a calorie deficit, rather
from a mindful and diligent choice to eliminate all grains and legumes from my
diet. As a result of that elimination,
low-carb living has also manifested as part of my life.
All the years of confusion about ketosis, dietary fat, hormonal
and metabolic processes, and food choice came rushing in like a tidal wave.
Interestingly, my own understanding about these issues seems to be shadowed by
an increase in media and scientific research as well, as though the information
needs to be spread far and wide and many different disciplines are working in
concert to get it there.
Life is a mysterious and wondrous thing.
