Monday, September 26, 2011

LKB

I am going to go waaay off into left field (as far as weight loss etc. is considered) and talk about something else for a minute. (or five) Call it weird, not to do this in a nice little card or in person, but I "seems ta' do my best thinkin' n' writin' on the keyboard"! (and on my blog) Plus it's 2011...I am keeping up with all this fancy "teknolegy" :)

Anyhoo...

We found out last week that a very important person in the life of our sweet little B is moving on to different (greener?)  pastures. Scott and I both struggled with this all weekend...

                             Oh. My. Gosh.                                                                What?!
What are we going to do?!
        How is B going to feel?!
Crap.                    How could they let her leave?!
                        How can we keep in touch?!
We just did not see this coming.                                Who will take her place?!
We have to learn to trust a new person?!
                  Crap.                          We are supposed to be happy for her.       


I strongly believe in the saying "it takes a village to raise a child". This is probably especially true for folks like us who have to leave our children in the care of other folks for eight or nine hours a day. (If you have never had to do this, I will tell you it is hard. You worry. You miss them. You appreciate them more when you finally get to see them at the end of the day.)

That being said... this person has been around for almost the entire two years of B's life. She has had such a positive, profound effect on B and each child she has worked with. I really think that these developmental years are sooo important. A young baby/child is literally a sponge. Listening. Watching. Thinking. Learning. Mimicking. Repeating. The ultimate goal is to expose your child to someone who is worth listening to, and worth watching and thinking about; someone to learn from, and who does and says things you want your child to mimic and repeat.

We had that and so much more in this person.

You Know Who You Are :)

We really only knew each other through Miss B, (and some crafty-soul vibes!) but B is one of the most precious threads that make up my life... so to know you through her is something I will never forget.

While we are utterly devastated by your leaving, we wish you the best that life has to give.

Who's awesome?  YOU are.


Thursday, September 22, 2011

Perspective

Stick with me, I really am going somewhere with this...

My two-year-old throws a fit if her food is not what or how she wants it. Nothing too extreme, but she likes what she likes. (Which, fortunately is a HUGE spectrum.) If you give that little girl peas when she has specified green beans, you are in for a throwdown!

As adults, we tend to just "roll with the punches" sometimes. This is especially so for many of us and our daily diets. We mean to do well, (and have that nice, leafy green salad and lean protein for lunch) but the fast food joint is sooo much more convienent. We may be running low on time, energy, money, etc... whatever it is, we settle for something less. We settle for something easy instead of (throwing a fit like a two-year-old) getting what we want (read: need) to eat.

That being said, this morning I managed to lock my little chica and myself out of the house. I had my purse, her bag, etc., but no car or house keys. I had a mini-melt down, had to call my husband and wait on him to come rescue us.

Granted it was not hot or cold today, it was raining. The car was unlocked so we were able to sit in the car for 30+ minutes while we waited on Scott.

What was I doing? Throwing a fit.

What was my two-year-old doing? Sitting in the backseat, kicking off her shoes, and singing. (about the rain, her ABCs, and her Nor-Nor Eleanor...)

This morning's situation was no big deal to her... but put something to eat in front of her she is not happy with and like a said earlier, throwdown!

Maybe as adults we have our priorities out of order. We could learn a lot from a two-year-old.

Just sayin'.

Stairs

The other day at work, someone asked me to check on something. In order to do that, I had to go to our business department which is upstairs in the main building of our central office. No biggie.

When I got back to my office, the following comment was made:

"Oh my gosh, I am so sorry I made you have to walk up those stairs!"

Soooo, I guess I am that girl. I am the pitiful fat girl who is unable to go up a simple flight of stairs without stroking out from it. I have opinions formed about me (yet again) because of my weight. (Well, obviously I am not always that girl...my knees were not even hurting that day, thank you!) [Read: the person who made the comment was in NO WAY being ugly...in fact, they have seen me with hurting knees...]

Anyways, this takes me my other thought...just because I am overweight does not mean I meet all the preconceived notions of being "FAT". When folks think of a fat person, they sometimes tend to picture a huge, sloppy, stinky, lazy, immobile person. Maybe that is why some of my friends look at me and say "You are not fat." Well, yes, yes, I am, but I think I take fat to literally mean overweight...obese...big... and they take it to be sloppy, stinky, lazy, etc.

Well, either way, the stairs did not bother me that day and I really hated being "that girl".

LOL, don't even get me started on the time someone told me I was the "most mobile/active person of my size" they had ever seen. Hrrrummmphhh. I'm not really that active, but then again I am not laying in bed 24/7, so give the fat girl a prize.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Well, Poop on a Biscuit

So, I am feeling a bit peppy today...it's the first "pep" I have felt in about 4 or 5 months, really.


If you read this post, then you know what has me fired up again.


I have apologized to my best friend in the whole world for always lamenting over and over about the same stuff. (Weight. Sugar. No Sugar. Diets. Willpower. No Willpower...) Perhaps I should apologize to the 7 or 8 readers of my blog too :\


I am no different than a drug addict who gets to their lowest point, then cleans up their act...only to slip-up and start hitting the good stuff again until they are out of control once more. Repeat cycle. See this post.

I have heard stories of addicts who have destroyed their lives. I have heard the pain and sadness in the voice of people telling stories of their loved one's struggles with drugs or other addictions. I have heard how much the addiction hurt families and friends. Maybe I have not hurt anyone with my food addictions (yet), but that mentality is surely something to stop and think about.

Let's just say I have been doing a lot of thinking. (Meanwhile, [testing a theory...] re-attempting Weight Watchers for two months, being constantly hungry and hateful, feeling sluggish and depressed and GAINING weight.)

Addiction

I am giving FULL CREDIT of the following text to Paul John Scott, who's article was published on Details.com's website. The following words are not my own, however they caught my attention. Big Time. If you have the time (and/or have ever doubted the efficacy of a no-sugar/low carb diet), I suggest reading the following in it's entirety.

(begin article)

I'm sitting in a comfortable chair, in a tastefully lit, cheerfully decorated drug den, watching a steady line of people approach their dealer. After scoring, they shuffle off to their tables to quietly indulge in what for some could become (if it hasn't already) an addiction that screws up their lives. It's likely you have friends and family members who are suffering from this dependence—and you may be on the same path yourself. But this addiction is not usually apparent to the casual observer. It has no use for the drama and the carnage you associate with cocaine and alcohol. It's slower to show its hand, more socially acceptable—and way more insidious.

I'm in a Panera Bread outlet. The company is on Fortune's 2010 list of the 100 Fastest Growing Companies and earned more than $1.3 billion in 2009, mainly from selling flour and sugar by the railcar. Last year, Zagat named it the most popular large chain in the United States and ranked it second in the Healthy Options category. The company responded by touting its "wholesome" food. Sure, Panera sells a few salads. But why do the scones, pastries, baguettes, and bear claws get all the good lighting? Why are the grab-and-go packs of cookies and brownies next to the register? What need is fulfilled by serving soup bowls made of bread, with a mound of bread for dipping, and then offering more bread on the side? How come it's noon and the couple behind me are eating bagels while the guy to my right is sawing into a cinnamon roll with a fork and a knife like it's a steak?

The answer is that fast-burning carbohydrates—just like cocaine—give you a rush. As with blow, this rush can lead to cravings in your brain and intrusive thoughts when you go too long without a fix. But unlike cocaine, this stuff does more than rewire your neurological system. It will short-circuit your body. Your metabolism normally stockpiles energy so you can use it as fuel later. A diet flush with carbohydrates will reprogram your metabolism, locking your food away as unburnable fat. When you get hungry again you won't crave anything but more of the same food that started you down the path to dependency. Think of this stuff as more than a drug—it's like a metabolic parasite, taking over your body and feeding itself.

You aren't supposed to talk this way about carbohydrates. According to USDA dietary recommendations, they are not only healthy but are supposed to make up the majority of the food we eat—45 to 65 percent of all calories. Carbs, which are classified as starches and sugars, make up the essence of bread, cereal, corn, potatoes, cookies, pasta, fruit, juice, candy, beer, and sweetened drinks—basically anything that isn't protein or fat. Our government's recommendations were established in the 1970s and have since been accompanied by an explosion of obesity and diabetes. The advice came about as early nutrition scientists rallied around a misguided maxim that remains embedded in the fabric of our attitudes toward food to this day: Eating too much fat makes you fat. But science never bore out this pre-Galilean view of nutrition. What is now clear is this: At the center of the obesity universe lie carbohydrates, not fat.

"You could live your whole life and never eat a single carbohydrate—other than what you get from mother's milk and the tiny amount that comes naturally in meat—and probably be just fine," says Gary Taubes, the award-winning author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is helping to reshape the conversation about what makes the American diet so fattening.

If all you knew about food is what you read in the USDA guidelines, you'd think our bodies conveniently come into the world seeking the one nutrient that is cheap and amenable to commercial mass production: carbohydrates. "Sugars and starches provide energy to the body in the form of glucose, which is the only source of energy for red blood cells and is the preferred energy source for the brain," says the latest edition of the guidelines. Wrong, says Taubes, who just released Why We Get Fat, a layman's version of his influential scientific tome. In the absence of carbs, your body will burn fatty acids for energy. It's how you sleep through the night without eating for eight hours. "The brain does indeed need carbohydrates for fuel," Taubes says, "but the body is perfectly happy to make those out of protein, leafy green vegetables, and the animal fat you're burning." As a pair of Harvard doctors (one an endocrinologist and one an epidemiologist) wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association last summer, carbohydrates are "a nutrient for which humans have no absolute requirement."

The Diets That Work

You wouldn't know it from reading the latest dietary headlines, but all of the popular diets—from Atkins to Dean Ornish (Bill Clinton's weight-loss plan) to the diet-of-the-moment, Paleo—are successful because the most important change they advise is the same: stop eating refined carbohydrates. This only reminds us of what had been the conventional wisdom in medicine for hundreds of years before the USDA stepped in: that sugar, flour, potatoes, and rice are what make a person fat, not meat and milk.

Forty years into the low-fat, high-carbohydrate way of eating—we can thank it for "diabesity," shorthand for the societal prevalence of type II diabetes paired with obesity—it seems clearer than ever that our problem lies not simply in carbohydrates, but in their fundamental addictiveness. They sidestep our defenses against overeating, activate brain pathways for pleasure, and make us simultaneously fat and malnourished. They keep us coming back for more, even as they induce physical decline and social rejection. They achieve this more effectively than the controlled substances that can get a guy thrown into jail. Maybe the question isn't whether carbohydrates are addictive, but whether they are the most addictive substance of all.

In 2007, researchers at the University of Bordeaux, France, reported that when rats were allowed to choose between a calorie-free sweetener and intravenous cocaine, 94 percent preferred the sugar substitute. The researchers concluded that "intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward. . . . The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction." Nicole Avena, an expert in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Florida in Gainesville, has spent many hours analyzing the behavior of rats enticed into sucking up sugar. She says that feeding on sugar can, like snorting coke, lead to bingeing, withdrawal, and craving. It does this by lighting up the same circuitry within the brain triggered by cocaine and amphetamines, the dopamine center.

But a carbohydrate addiction is potentially more destructive than an 8-ball-a-day habit, because it hijacks your metabolism. If you eat a low-carb diet, you are able to remain satiated between meals, because the body will burn its fat stores. But eating carbs, especially refined varieties like sugar or flour, sweetened drinks, or starches, causes the body to release the hormone insulin. The body secretes insulin as a response to high blood sugar—a serious, even potentially lethal health risk over time. The hormone directs cells to extract sugar from the blood and store it as fat, and what's worse, in order to get sugar out of the blood as efficiently as possible, insulin makes it extremely difficult for the body to burn its fat stores. Over time, the presence of insulin in our carb-heavy diet causes diminishing returns. As our cells become resistant to the effects of insulin, our bodies frequently release even more of it to compensate. The result is a blood-sugar vacuum: The body craves more of what the hormone feeds on and triggers our hunger mechanism, which works subconsciously, to direct us toward the nutrient causing all the problems in the first place—carbohydrates. You get fatter and your body craves even more carbs in order to maintain your increasing weight. Drug cartels can only dream of a narcotic with an addiction cycle this powerful.

Once hooked, can you quit your carb addiction? It's not like there's a carb-cessation program at Promises, after all. Taubes says it won't be easy, but given the alternatives, you simply have to try. And cold turkey is as good a method as any. "Anecdotal evidence suggests that the craving for carbs will go away after a while," he says, "although whether a while is a few weeks or a few years is hard to say." And frighteningly like an addict in recovery, you're unlikely ever to be totally cured, and you'll always be tempted to relapse when the opportunity arises. Be warned: The number of Panera Bread outlets is 1,421 and counting.



How You Get Hooked (Over Time)

1. When you take in carbs, like Gatorade or whole-wheat bread, you secrete the hormone insulin. Even thinking about carbs causes this to happen.

2. Refined carbs spike blood sugar, and this is a big problem. The first result is that your body immediately stops burning its existing fat stores.

3. Too much blood sugar is a dangerous situation, and in response, insulin, a hormone, rips it from your blood and tells the body to store the energy as fat (in men this first happens around the waist).
4. Normally your liver controls blood sugar, but because you eat so many carbs you have a constant supply of insulin circulating. This turns out to be bad—very bad. This causes you to become resistant to insulin.

5. Insulin resistance means your body pumps out more insulin to make up for the deficit. Now you're getting fat, but what's worse is that your body desires even more carbs as fodder for the excess insulin.

6. You get fatter and fatter and your body craves more carbs to feed your increasing girth. This destructive cycle is why Americans are so overweight (the process doesn't happen overnight).

(end of article)

Holy crap. Not that this is anything different that what some of my more simple-minded posts have been about...but did you read that?

Sighhh... so I'm sitting here sipping my unsweetened tea. I had 2 strips of turkey bacon for breakfast and some lean turkey for a snack. Sugar is making me miserable...yes, but killing me, and wrecking havoc on my life and those around me too? Yep. Just like a drug.