Tuesday, January 10, 2012

More excuses for being fat

So even though I might be smarter than the average bear and realize that excess weight is due to a surfeit of intake versus output and that consuming more vegetables might be more beneficial than eating fig crackers spread with cookie butter (yes cookie butter..had to try it from Trader Joe's), I remain fat.

When I first met with the Moms 32 (!!!) years ago, I told them despite their lying eyes, I was really a thin person. I had gained 80 lbs pregnant with  Shanna. As she weighed somewhat less than that at birth, there was still a lot left over for me not to love. The excess was gone by the time she was one. The same story not much later with Josh though the weight gain wasn't as severe. Still I lost it all once I took up running. Same story with Naomi much later but then the pregnancy somehow triggered Graves' Disease. It made it much easier to lose the weight and I ended weighing as little as I did in junior high. Fine by me but GD has its own problems (heart failure anyone?) and it took almost 3 years to figure out what was going on. Since I was treated (by radiation), my weight has slowly crept from thin, normal, slightly chunky, to fat and then once I broke my arm and couldn't really move anything except the fork to my mouth, to very fat. And then I was hyPOthyroid, which helped preserve my new obesity even though the arm wasn't hurting so much. Just as I was recovering from that, CANCER, not a weight loss opportunity as one would think no thanks to steroids which made me ravenous and a low red blood cell count, which made exercising challenging.

OK so now I am not injured, have no signs of cancer, have normal blood counts and thyroid hormone levels, am able to run (albeit very slowly) for an hour and a half without stopping, know the basic rules  of input and output, I should be back to my thin self or at least my normal self but NO...

I read a lot and now have come up with some new excuses all gleaned from science pages:

  • I am fat because my gut is infested with these bacteria which extract nutrition from even celery and share it with the host. I recently met a woman on a research project at UM who is sequencing their genome in hopes of developing a drug that will just kill them. Strange, though, as I am the only one in the family infested with them (everyone else is thin bordering on underweight).
  • I am fat because I can't sleep.Sleep deprivation leads to low levels of leptin which signals saiety and high levels of ghrelin, which increase appetite particularly for cookies covered in cookie butter.
  • Stress..yep plenty of that especially in the past 8 years. Higher levers of cortisol, stimulates neuropeptide Y, which stimulates carbohydrate cravings. (I was on a project at work trying to find an antagonist to this, unsuccessful).
  • And today, I read that I am fat because I have a fat personality or a tendency to 'easily experience negative emotions'.
  • Multitasking which leads to mindless eating. Should convert my behavior to 'mindful' eating.
Yeah lots of excuses. But this should be fixable right? I did get rid of the cancer weight...

One more day of spring and then the real weather returns. I could see a beautiful sunrise again this morning but it didn't look as nice through my camera lens. Yesterday, Ms Maya and I went to an indoor playground. The squishy floor set off a dance reflex in her..she tries to invent steps, which have been becoming more complicated. Music isn't necessary to entice her to dance. She of course looks adorable doing her little dances.

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