Color me surprised.

I had a feeling as soon as Blogger showed a massive spike in pageviews that Al had linked to me again. I'm not surprised that once again he's assuming things that aren't in the entry (never said a bad day of eating was 3500 calories, he added together example of different days; I don't believe I've even stated my height which is not five feet), assuming I'm lying (If I weren't "coming clean" about the treats etc I wouldn't have explicitly listed the junk I was eating), and using the old one-size-fits-all-calories are everything method came up with 7,500 calories a day for a week to gain five pounds (another figure he pulled out of thin air, when did I say anything about five pounds in a week).

Really, Al's response is an absolutely perfect example of the point of what I said in that entry: People assume if you're fat, you're eating massive amounts of food all the time. It doesn't matter what you say. As I've said repeatedly, I have absolutely had my binges. Plenty of them, in fact. I was not eating healthful things. No denying that. But the plain truth is that my average daily intake of strictly calories is nowhere near what people would assume by looking at me. I'm not "lying to myself and posting it for the world to see." I have no reason to lie to myself. I am fully aware of my size, my eating choices, and their consequences. I have no reason to lie to anyone reading this completely anonymous blog. But, again, I'm fat, and my statements don't tally up with the old calories-are-everything belief, so I must be lying. Or too stupid to realize what I'm putting in my own mouth, or too deluded, or whatever. It couldn't possibly be that there's more to weight and metabolism than strictly calories, nope. Couldn't be that I have blood sugar and insulin resistance issues, and the consistent intake of sugar was keeping my insulin chronically high which prevented any fat from leaving my cells (because, you know, that's one of the things that insulin does). I must be just a liar. Even though I'm stating that the choices I made caused that situation, I'm still not "owning up" to it somehow.

Now obviously a lot of people have lost weight, and even a lot of it, strictly by counting calories. I'm not saying it can't or doesn't work. I'm saying it's not the only factor for everybody. For somebody with insulin resistance, eating low-calorie and high-carb at the same time is going to make weight loss exceedingly difficult. Even if you need fuel, if there's a bunch of residual insulin in your bloodstream because of  massive sugar spike that's only very slowly coming down, it's going to block the mechanism that moves fat from the cells for use. Eventually the insulin level will come down, and fat from cells would begin to be released -- unless you eat a bunch of carbohydrate again, of course, which is likely to happen when you start feeling tired and cranky because you're running on empty because your body can't access your stored fat for energy. Now, if your metabolism is functioning normally and you don't have any issues with insulin resistance, that's a different situation.

In any event, it doesn't really bother me on a personal level. I've had worse things said about me by nicer people, as my father would say. What bothers me are the societal assumptions about overweight people, which is what I said in the first place.


I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday up to my eyeballs in wedding cake baking, which sort of turned into a disaster. Things were fine until the cake stand broke. And there was no air conditioning in the hall and the bride flatly refused to have fondant over the buttercream, even though it would have looked much nicer and withstood the heat better than smoothed buttercream (and been a hell of a lot easier on me). I wasn't happy with how the cake looked, but at least everyone told me it tasted great.

I haven't been paying a goddamn bit of attention to what I've been eating since .. er .... going on a week, I don't remember exactly. No excuse for it other than just not caring. I definitely feel shitty, though. My allergies are worse, my moods are unstable due to the see-sawing blood sugar (wheee, let's not eat anything for 24 hours and then gulp down a burger and fries!), and food doesn't taste as good. I'm going home tomorrow (wedding was 100 miles away), and will even have a little money for grocery shopping, so I'll be stocking up on meat, cheese, fruits, and vegetables again. I'm not expecting to have any weight loss this month, but I would like to undo any damage I've done this week and at least maintain the 12 pound loss from last month.

Rambling on down the road.

A friend took me out for dinner tonight, and I found myself mindlessly munching on chips while we talked. That's the downside of having spent so many years not restricting my eating at all: sometimes I truly forget I'm not supposed to eat something. Of course, I wouldn't trade that for the self-hatred, self-flagellation, and general fuck-up-ness I lived with daily before. Anyway, I stopped eating the chips when I realized it, so that was good.

I've been feeling sort of mindless hunger all day. I just had some Almond NutThins crackers with turkey and cheese, but I still feel like eating and I don't really know why. I feel a little bit of physical hunger, but mostly it's just the sort of gnawing urge to .... gnaw. I'm going to chalk it up to boredom or hormones or something. Or it could be from the carbs/wheat in the chips, maybe. There is definitely something about certain carbs that trigger stupid hunger in me. Potatoes not so much, rice not so much, even desserts don't really. But bread and bread-type things totally do me in.

A couple of interesting things occurred to me yesterday. The first is that at this time of the month, I usually have an absolutely gigantic cystic acne bump on one side of my chin or the other. It hangs around for a week or so, generally healing up and turning back in to normal skin about a week before another pops up. Well, this month I don't have one of those things! Oh, I still have a little bit of acne happening, most likely because I haven't had the money to get the face wash and lotion that really make my skin look good. But the Great Red Spot didn't put in an appearance this month.

Also, and this is slightly embarrassing to even admit ... but, well, I'm sure plenty of you have encountered this before. Especially when it's hot, or if I wear heat-trapping pants, I get this sort of rash-like thing under my stomach. It hurts like a burn when it's exposed to air, but it also hurts when anything touches it. And it's a wet rash, that really doesn't smell nice. The only thing that helps it is putting ice packs under my stomach, or coating the entire area with calamine lotion. I figured it was just a rash until I had a bad bout of it going in to sinus surgery, and it totally cleared up for a while after the lovely course of antibiotics I had afterward. That was when I figured out it was some sort of bacterial/yeasty thing. I've always cleaned under my flab, because I hate to be sticky and sweaty at all, but it would still happen when it was really hot out. I figured out that if every other day or so I wore bikini-style underwear that go under my stomach, it would sort of draw the moisture away and it wouldn't happen. If I wore briefs for a while, especially in bad heat, it would start to crop up a little.

I didn't realize it under yesterday, but in the last month I haven't had any issues, and I haven't been wearing the bikini underwear because I've only got a couple of pairs left and I don't know where one of them has ended up anyway. And I haven't had a single problem! Not even the day I went to the rodeo in jeans and lovely summer heat.

The only thing that's changed has been what I eat. The lack of giant acne makes sense; the other I guess is because .. um ... I don't know. Better body chemistry in general, maybe? Anyway, I'm certainly not complaining! Wonder what else will happen ... or not happen. I know a lot of people say they sleep better when they eat better, or that they're more energetic, but that never happens to me. Not anymore, at least. The first and second times I seriously restricted my carbohydrate intake, I felt like shit for a week and then I felt fucking amazing. I still remember exceedingly clearly one evening when I was 17 (the first time I tried eating this way), and I was running across the lawn to my car and I felt so light and so incredible, I'd never felt better in my life!

Sadly, that doesn't happen when I cut out carbs now, and hasn't for a long time. I had the misfortune to contract mono my second semester at college, and goddamn, did that stuff fuck me up long-term. Before then, I'd sleep four hours a night or so and have plenty of energy. I ran around like your typical normal teenager (and was still fat). Then I caught mono, and spent six months sleeping about 20 hours a day, unable to wake up or function properly even though it seemed like I'd had such a mild case of it. The doctor I went to didn't even diagnose me with mono; it wasn't until my boyfriend got so sick I ended up taking him to the emergency room that we figured out I even had it.

Anyway, since then I'm just chronically fucking tired. I thought it was because I was working too hard with school, etc. Then I thought it was just because I was fat. I dropped fifty pounds and was still exhausted all the time. I was exercising a lot too, and never got that endorphin rush or increased energy most people report. I had my thyroid checked, and my blood sugar, and my iron levels, and all sorts of stuff, and nothing ever came up as a reason for my exhaustion. I got on Prozac for my depression, which didn't help my physical exhaustion but at least keeps my brain running okay. I'll seriously be on that shit forever. I had sinus surgery to correct a bunch of issues, which did help a little, but not much. I had a sleep study done. I've had the blood tests re-done every year or so, and they're always normal. It's incredibly fucking frustrating.

Man, I ramble sometimes. The point is that I don't feel physically any different since changing my eating. It would be easier to do this if I did feel better. It's annoying.

Once again, being social is good.

(Weight wise, the news is that I ate well today. Other than that it's a bunch of blathering.)

I managed to sleep a little bit today, and woke up starving. I was in the process of making myself something to eat when somebody knocked on my door and my dog went absolutely nuts. It was a college kid doing one of those fundraiser things, and I thought that once I told him I was unemployed and couldn't help, that would be the end of the conversation. Instead, I ended up talking to him for almost an hour. It was quite a weird conversation; I think he was hitting on me, truthfully. He kept asking me questions, and telling me personal stuff, and complimenting me. I now know that this stranger used to have a Prince Albert piercing, has 21 tattoos, likes big women and was in fact in an amateur porno with a big woman, his sister works for a big adult film company, he takes certain drugs for "enhancement" in sexual situations, and he thinks all women should have at least three vibrators.

Most people would probably be uncomfortable with a conversation like that with a stranger, I think. I just laughed and shot back jokes about threesomes and strippers. But it was still a very odd encounter. He gave me his phone number in case I ever wanted help with "chores." He also said he'd been wanting to stop by and find out who had the car with the great racing stripes (they're not great, they're freaking stupid). It doesn't happen to me often, but I definitely got the feeling he was hitting on me. I might have enjoyed it more if he hadn't said "wasn't there a guy living here too?"
I said my mom lived here before and she was married.
"No, since then. A big guy?" and he made that shoulder gesture that means muscular instead of fat.
My heart sank and I tried to say casually, "I had a boyfriend for a while."
"Kicked him to the curb, huh?" he grinned at me.
"No. The opposite." I tried to say it in a tone of voice that would shut him up.
It didn't work. "Oh. Why?"
I had to swallow hard before I could say, not very loudly, "I don't know."
"Well, he's dumb! You're cute."
I just laughed and said thanks. Once he left, though, I felt really sad. Then I started to get paranoid and wonder if he was just pumping me for information because he's going to rob and rape me or something. But he looked like he was about to shit his pants when my dog was barking at him, so I'm not too worried.

I finished making my dinner and ate, trying to decide if I wanted to meet a friend for our usual Saturday night bingo or not. I didn't feel like facing the world but she guilted me in to it, so I showered and left. And I cried all the way in to town, and then was so early I didn't want to go in by myself so I sat in a park by a willow tree kind of in the dark and sniffled to myself. I hate how much I miss him. I hate that I miss him and not just someone. And I'm shocked that it's not triggering binge after binge after binge, honestly. I guess it's because in this case, I know that eating won't make me feel better. Sometimes it does. In this case, though, it wouldn't accomplish anything.

Not for me!

Anyway, I met my friend, and I consumed all my carbs for the day in one meal but overall behaved myself. I didn't even eat the pile of chocolate deliciousness she kept trying to push on me and ordering me to eat because she was full. No fucking idea how I managed that. By the time I headed home, I was feeling .... not happy, but at least not miserable. I felt slightly hopeful. It lasted a couple of hours before I started getting mopey and sniffly again. It's like I need constant stimulation, constant distraction, or else I start obsessing and missing him and moping.

I'm not naturally a weepy person. Depressed, yes, which is why I've been on Prozac for years, but that's just a biochemical imbalance (my personal theory is that my mother smoked marijuana while she was pregnant with me). That aside, I'm usually loud and cheerful and the life/annoyance of a party. Or at least a small group. I feel like my lovesickness is almost totally subsuming my personality. If this stuff doesn't start to pass soon ... fuck, I don't know what I'll do. I can't afford professional help. I guess all I can do is keep trying to process it. I should probably delete his number from my phone but I can't yet. I did finally get rid of the last of the pictures. I still have them on my computer, but I haven't looked at them in a week. I guess that's something.

I'm worried about what will happy in terms of my eating if I do start feeling normal again, though. It's weirdly easier now that it is when I feel happy. When I'm happy I'm more likely to toss everything to the wind because it doesn't seem important when I'm already happy. Of course, I'm not doing this because of being unhappy, because weight loss won't do anything for that either.