Dietdefector’s Blog

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I made it through…

Yesterday I decided that I would do the Fast 5 method of eating, it is where you don’t eat anything for 19 hours and then you have a 5 hour eating window. I was sure I would be able to make it to the 19th hour…however I wasn’t sure how I would manage my 5 hours of eating. I know how much I can put away in short order. I decided I would do exactly what the author recommended and “open my eating window” at 5pm. It was a challenge to keep myself distracted and away from food. I thought about how much I missed my morning coffee with creamer, lots of creamer that is. I decided I would have black coffe for the boost. I put a little stevia in it and pretended that it was wonderful. I also thought about how I can fit my creamy coffee into this way of eating, it will have to most definately be decaf after 5. Every few hours I would calculate how much longer before I can eat. At about 3 o’clock, I decided I should make myself a sandwhich it eat in the car at 5…I did not want to drive around ravenous. I felt like a spoiled child, all worried about when I was going to get things my way next. I realized that I am still afraid of hunger. Today I will be more fearless, it wasn’t hard at all to wait to eat. It was hard to stop when I knew I was no longer hungry. I trust it will all balance out…soon I hope.

Starting over again….

I am counting the hours until I can eat again…only 9 more hours. I am going to see if I can do the Fast 5 program today. You fast for 19 hours then you have a five hour eating window. It is pretty much the opposite of what I have believed about metabolism in the past, but I am going to try this and trust…trust that my body deserves a break from steady intake of food for twelve to fourteen hours a day. I cant remember what hungry feels like. Most of the time I am shoving food down my mouth, knowing that I am not hungry, I am usually quite anxious and looking for something to make me feel calmer.

Never give up…

Just to make something perfectly clear, I have no intention at all for settling into ignoring the glaring truth that I am too fat.  I refuse to surrender my being to the unneeded stress of excessive fat.  There will be a before and after, something  to sandwhich this moment between.  The war, the peace treaty and the new world order.  What I have now is a new hope, and it all started the moment Idecided to step back and observe.  An honest accounting of my history, and to finally accept that I have been fighting a battle that I was destined to lose.  I was going against the wisdom of my body.  No matter how hard I fought, my body would always win out and return to it’s own status quo.  Some people would call this a set point.  A return to a certain weight.  A stubborn resisitence to move in any direction.  The number would get bigger and bigger as time marched on.  Each time I would loss weight, I would gain it all back plus ten more pounds.  Well that’s how it all would happen.  I would go on a diet, lose five to ten pounds, and then quit losing weight. The worst of it all was that I would diet down five. 

Over the years, the weight continued to pile on.  I can remember my first set point being 127 pounds, but it wasn’t long, say in my early twenties that it crept up to 150 pounds.  That was the number I could not break.  So it is that today, after years of starving myself, and being generally vigilant about the fat, I weighed in at the doctors office at 177 pounds.  For the first time ever, I didn’t kick off my shoes to step on the scales.  I didn’t even moan to the all too tiny woman who recorded the number.  It was just another number that only carried the meaning that I was willing to attach to it.  I made the appointment for my routine check up.  I resisted the temptation to ask what I weighed the last time.  I don’t even want to know anymore.  I wasn’t there to be judged for my weight.  I was there to take care of my body.

Diet Wars History

Today, I begin a new plan.  I am coming clean. Beginning negotiation with my wiser self with the intention to stop fighting!  The attacks and counter attacks have taken a toll on me for the last four decades.  Now it is time to bring in all the tactical force that I have deployed against the numbers on my bathroom scales and the geography of my body.  I want a real answer as to why after all these years of fighting…I have gained no sustainable ground.  This is the story of my war, how I have fought it and how I am going to use my highest power to see a peaceful end to my battle against my body. 

My last maneuver was a raw food vegan regime…and let me say, it was the most radical, intense assignment I have ever accepted.   In the past, I have not been adverse at all to trying the latest diet to come down the pipe.  In fact I have lost count.  I still keep my lifetime membership card to Weight Watchers tucked neatly in a blue vinyl bag along with a stack  of booklets I collected.  I check in every few years, to get the new program, which I then abandon after a few weeks.   My  copy of “Do I Look Fat in This? sits on my bookshelf, waiting for me to read it again…but I simply cannot.  

It is time for me to defect…and I mean really walk away from all the endless advice on how to lose weight.  I am now going to actually do something so simple that I can hardly believe that I have not been doing this all along…I am going to eat less food…How?? you ask so I will tell you.  I am going to use intermittent fasting.  I will explain all this to you later, but first I want to tell you how I came to this place in my life. 

I still remember the elation, the feeling of euphoria that flooded my  heart when I was first went down to the local community center to enlist.  I was really much too young to understand what I was getting in to.  All I knew was that if I was ever going to look good in those clothes I wanted to wear, well I would have to be thin…  I knew I could never hope to be as thin as Twiggy, and I was certain that my mother would never support an eyelash adhesive addiction for those eyes….but I held high hopes that I could rid my waist and hips of anything that might look like a curve or extra pudge.    Weight Watchers had become the gold standard for rapid advancement into the ranks of the proud and the perfected. 

The only criteria for acceptancece into the program…you had to be at least  ten pounds over the ideal and acceptable weight according to the Metropolitan Life insurance charts for 1959.  I weighed in at a whooping 128 pounds…exactly ten pounds more than the lowest weight for my 5’6″ frame.  All  I could imagine was how good it was going to feel to drop those ten pounds…to weigh under 120.  After all, what right did I have to take up more space with my body than those life insurance companies deemed necessary for a female of my height.     I was a young girl who wanted to do my best to serve humanity, to live up to the standard of perfection.

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