Diets vs Programs

I hate diets but I want to be....skinny! Healthy! In shape! We've all said it and yet for most of us, it seems to be an unwinnable battle complete with frustration and in many cases, further weight gain. Arrrrrrggggghhhhhhh!!!!!  

Today's blog is a little bit about how we (especially women) tend to torture our bodies for the elusive gold star of perfection, only to find that the star isn't always so easily attainable and if we do get it, it isn't always as bright and shiny as we had hoped. It is also about the fact that we might be able to get on our way to being thinner, healthier, and in better shape without doing the whole "diet" thing. Are you intrigued?????? Then keep reading!

To begin with.....over the course of the last 30 years, I have probably been on every diet known to man, not limited to, but including diet pills of various kinds. Where did it get me? In most cases.....nowhere. In a few cases, I was smack dab in the middle of an eating disorder and in other cases, downright physically sick.  

So why did I or does anyone for that matter, do this to their bodies? Because we want what we think the world wants from us and expects us to look like. We want only one chin, the right size boobs, the right curves, and just enough junk in the trunk to fill out our favorite jeans. It really doesn't seem like that is asking too much, but then we find ourselves stress-eating an entire pizza at midnight and another chin just seems to drop on cue. We then realize that we are fighting a losing battle with all the things we want but can't seem to get. We don't look the way we want to because we stress eat and we stress eat because we don't look the way we want to. It is the very definition of frustration. 

In my lifetime, the expectations of what women should look like have gone from the ridiculous and unachievable body curvature and measurements of Barbie to the pencil-thin Twiggyesque look. High-end fashion ads have promoted everything from no boobs to big boobs, no hips to fully rounded hips, and in my opinion their worst call ever.....the emaciated heroin chic where all the models looked like they had one foot in the grave. Now, what kind of message does that send to young kids who are already having body issues because of puberty, hormones, and just the awkwardness of adolescence and are looking to society to lead them to whatever the social norms are currently calling attractive and beautiful?  I'll give you a hint. It sends a bad one!

One day at the gym, I heard a young woman who was very small and attractive and also sweating her rear end off, make a comment that she wished she had lived back in the olden days when everyone was skinny and obesity didn't seem to be an issue. Instead though, here she was fighting every calorie just so she didn't gain a pound. Assuming her age was late 20something, I also assumed that olden days to her were just about anytime before the 1980s. To be fair, the 80s were in fact, a time of excess in everything, including food. So...... 

Prior to the 80s though, people stayed fit and healthy because they worked all the time and their meal portions weren't as large as they are today. Fast food also wasn't nearly as prevalent therefore more meals were eaten at home and cooked fresh with little or no processed or prepackaged food. Also, prior to the 70s, more food was homecooked, so there were not as many chemicals and additives in our foods that can actually cause cravings and yes, even weight gain. Add to this, the fact that people seemed to be more active with the lack of technology that keeps most of us sitting on our butts, and the world may have been an overall healthier place....in the olden days.  

Since the years of excess though, people, and women especially have done some truly crazy and unhealthy things with beauty and the perfect body as their goal. They have injected themselves with horse urine, starved themselves, taken laxatives by the handful, practiced binge eating and throwing it all up, taking speed (it was basically sold over the counter back in the day), and going to quack doctors with a diet pill side hustle. We were literally giving ourselves addictions and killing ourselves for some idea of perfection. Apparently getting healthy had nothing to do with it. All we were interested in was looking good in a bikini. 

In the early 2000s obesity started rising at alarming rates and becoming not only unhealthy but one of the leading causes of death related to heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer. Sadly, it also started to become more acceptable, as society had a newfound love for people loving their bodies, regardless of how healthy they were. There was a definite belief going through the land, that if you couldn't or didn't want to put the effort into losing the weight, you might as well celebrate it...... and celebrate we did. Amidst the celebration though, people started ballooning up to 600 lbs and far beyond. They were getting so sick and they even lost their mobility and independence. It's hard to celebrate when a specially reinforced hospital bed, dependence on others to do even the smallest things for you, and bedsores are pretty much your life. 

At this point, people started realizing that maybe they would never be what society touted as perfect, and more importantly, maybe it didn't matter. They could eat and still be healthy though. So they started looking at not just diets but tried and true weight loss programs. Weight Watchers was pretty much at the top of that list and it had a huge hand in the last few decades for turning people back to eating normal and being healthy. Then we started hearing from a  new kid on the block, called Trim Healthy Mama. THM also started changing people's lives one meal at a time. 

Honestly, with all the "diets" I have been on over the years, if a diet is what you are looking for, you literally are not going to find one with long-term weight loss results. Diets will only help you take the weight off, but you will always gain it back. WW and THM, on the other hand, are different as they are not diets but lifestyle changers and because of this, these two are the only two that I would put any faith in right now. 

To compare and contrast the two, WW is by far the older of the two programs and through the years they have tweaked and refined the program to keep it up to date with our modern lifestyles. It will also cost you to be an official Weight Watcher, as there are weekly meetings, weigh-ins, and foods and materials if you choose to purchase them. They are all add ons to a program that could actually stand on its own without them. In all the years as a program, WW has had many long-term and even lifetime success stories of people losing the weight and keeping it off, because it was real food, prepared at home, and it taught people how to not only eat well but also to change how they viewed and ate food. 

Trim Healthy Mama or THM on the other hand,  (in my opinion) may have surpassed WW. Yes, there are $$ to be spent, as you really need to purchase at least the first THM book and maybe one of the cookbooks, but those are one-time purchases and there are no weekly fees and no weigh-ins in front of the world. The biggest difference between THM and WW though is that THM has many ways to work their "program" and there is a science of sorts behind how it all works. 

With THM, it basically boils down to three meals and three snacks/day timed out at least three hours apart. In a meal or snack, you can either eat carbs or fats, but don't combine the two, and in a day, you should eat maybe two carb meals and a carb snack and two fat meals and a fat snack, or you can mix and match any way you want. Sugar is a big no-no as are pops, soda's or whatever you call them unless they are sweetened with stevia, xylitol, or erythritol. These are also the only sweeteners you can cook and bake with.  Aspartame, sucralose, or any of those other highly chemicalized sweeteners are out the door. Another plus for THM is that you learn to make just about everything from fresh, therefore, you know exactly what is going into your food and your body. At first, this means a lot more time in the kitchen, but the majority of the recipes are easy, and as you learn to plan ahead and pre-prep, it becomes a lot less work and a lot more worth the effort. 

In both programs, they are not considered true diets, as diets are temporary and not meant to be used long-term or past the time you lose your desired weight. This is also why diets don't tend to work in the long term, because in most cases, in a period of time, the weight comes back as we tend to find our way back to the eating that caused us to need a diet in the first place. However, with WW and THM, they are both considered lifestyle changers, meaning that by working these programs, you change how you see food, buy food, prepare food and eat food. The recipes in these programs are also good, family-friendly, and meals that can be carried out throughout the rest of your life. 

In my opinion, both of these programs are so good because they teach you to not only take care of your body but to also make it healthier and learn to love it permanently. They also help you to have a completely different relationship with food and to pay attention to not only what you eat, but also what you buy. Diets just can't and don't do that.

So, now you may be thinking, "Wow Lisa, that is a lot of information, but I am not sure I am ready to commit to a diet or a lifestyle change, so what can I do right now to lose ten pounds by Saturday?" 

Well.....I have good news for you and bad news for you. The bad news is that short of doing something very unhealthy, there is really no magic wand that can be waved and make you lose ten pounds in two days. The good news though, is that if being healthy and preparing your body bit by bit for a positive lifestyle change is something you might like to do, then there are four things you can start doing right now. 

1) Start drinking 48-64 ounces of water every day. This flushes impurities out of the body and is good for your skin, heart, kidneys, muscles, and colon. Yes, at first you will pee every 30 minutes, but by Friday, you may have lost some water weight. Drinking this much water every day is very good for your body both inside and out. 

2) Start moving. I don't mean just housework or grocery shopping. I mean get out and walk for at least 30 minutes every day. Even if you can't walk a full half-hour, start with 10 minutes and work your way up. Walking is one of the healthiest ways to love your body. It gets you moving which gets your heart and blood pumping. It is good for your muscles and joints, not to mention your lungs and your heart. Who knows....you may drop a few pounds and start changing the shape of your body too?!

3) Right now!!! Drop that soda or diet soda and don't pick it or any variety of it, up again! That's right. Even "only" diet soda drinkers, tend to lose weight when they quit drinking diet soda. Why? Because the chemicals in diet soda can trigger sugar cravings that cause you to want and usually eat more sugary foods. So, no diet soda, and those cravings decrease by a lot. And of course, if you drink straight sugar soda and quit, think of all the sugar you are NOT putting into your body. It is a win/win. If you just absolutely have to drink diet soda, switch to one with stevia, xylitol, or erythritol, but nothing with the last letters "ame' or "ose" in it. If you just absolutely have to drink regular soda.....just don't. It is nothing but liquid sugar. Also, check out my blog here where I talked about Good Girl Moonshine. It is a THM gem of a drink and can help you drop the soda much quicker and much easier. 

4) Finally, don't eat after 6 p.m. This is a must for people with acid reflux and by not eating after 6, it gives your food time to metabolize and not sit in your gut causing sleeplessness. Also, eating after 6 p.m. is linked to weight gain, something most of us are trying to avoid. 

Well, there you have it. The four things you can start right now that don't commit you to a diet or a program but definitely give you a leg up to a healthier life.

So the lesson here is, you don't have to look like anyone but you to be beautiful. You do though, have to put some work in if you want to stay healthy and it doesn't matter if you weigh on the low end of the scale or the high end of the scale, the goal is to always strive to be healthy. The key is to treat yourself the same way you wish others would treat you. Love yourself. Show your body respect and do the maintenance it takes to keep yourself in top running performance. After all, aren't you worth it? I know I am!

Until next time, drink that water, walk that mile and always remember that you are so very worth it.  

My Truth and the Lies We Tell Ourselves

Soooooo.......let's just pretend that almost 18 months hasn't gone by since my last blog post here. *Poof* forgotten.

Lies! I've talked about them before and likely, I will talk about them again.

Usually the biggest lies we tell ourselves are about ourselves. With our own body image it is really hard to be honest sometimes, especially as we get older and our bodies change. Truthfully though, I have always had a warped image of my body and therefore been a damn good self deceiver when it came to.....me!

Now bare with me as I start pointing fingers. I am fully aware as an adult where the fault lies with my diet, exercise and health in general. However, I didn't just frivolously jump on the bandwagon that led me here. No, I was shamed and in some ways, forced into it.

As a very young kid, I was a picky eater and very skinny. I was tiny from my head to my toes. I even had a dentist tell me once that I had the tiniest teeth he had ever worked on. I remember still wearing a size 6 little girls long after my friends were in size 8's and 10's. I was not a food lover and spent many an hour sitting at the table long after everyone else was through eating, because I wouldn't eat my food. Then, my mother who was also very thin and who had always had the metabolism of a hummingbird, got a divorce. That divorce did us all in I think.

My mother began to turn to food as comfort during this time and her once active lifestyle was replaced with what I now believe was depression. She began preparing large fattening meals and supplementing with fast food. After she put on about 20 pounds and started feeling physically like crap (mom had Lupus and a good diet is crucial to Lupus survival) she joined Weight Watchers and took it all off in 6 weeks. As far as I went, I had taken a liking to homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, scalloped potatoes, pizza and hamburgers and yes....I put on some weight but mostly my metabolism was still pretty good and my weight was more puberty related.

Looking back, had my mother just changed all of our diets over to more of a Weight Watchers mind set and not focused so heavily on weight, scales and body image, I might not ever have gone down the road I did. The icing on the cake for me though(no pun intended), was my mom taking me to the doctor for a physical and the doctor telling "me" not her, that I had put on 5 pounds in the last year but that I hadn't grown any taller, therefore if I didn't go on a "diet" right now, I was going to be "fat!" Yep! My self image was pretty much in the toilet at 11 years old.

From that moment on, I was on a lifelong journey of self-love vs. self-loathing, binge eating, diet pills, laxatives, anorexia and obesity. I judged myself the way I felt the world judged me and that was by how I looked. This was validated by peoples attitudes toward me based on my weight.

During my high school years, I was not skinny by any stretch, but I was not fat either. At that time in society though, the world worshiped "skinny" to the point of no butt and no boobs. Now you could get by with the bigger boobs if you had a tiny waist and butt, but if you had a voluptuous figure at all, you were "fat!" Since I was only 5'1", I had no waist, but I did have boobs and a butt and because I wasn't bikini body, waif thin.....I was viewed as and talked about as fat. Then, my senior year in high school, right at Thanksgiving I got sick. I couldn't eat for about a week and being young and having a decent metabolism, I dropped about 10 pounds, which was a lot for my tiny body. Then my mother got sick and we thought she had heart issues. The worry and stress over that caused me to drop another 5 pounds. Then I got a crush on a guy at school. My obsession with him caused another 5 to come off. By the time I went back to school after Christmas break, I was 20 pounds down and it seemed that everyone noticed it. Guys who had never given me the time of day suddenly found me "interesting" and girls suddenly either got friendlier or meaner depending on whether they found my new weight loss a threat or not. Even my parents were noticing. Suddenly my dad was "proud" of the way I looked and was taking me out to buy brand new clothes, something he never did before.

There was a problem with all of this though. I was still me and I still liked scalloped potatoes and hamburgers and once I was no longer sick, worried and infatuated, my appetite was back and I was hungry. When I started gaining back the first 5 pounds, I panicked. I liked thin me and I wasn't going to give it up. That is when I took out stock in laxatives. The fact that I have any colon left today is a miracle as I would down literally boxes of laxatives after I ate. It worked but one of the nasty side effects (aside from the obvious) was that taking that many laxatives dehydrates you and dehydration caused me horrific migraines. At the time I didn't realize the correlation, but now I know why I spent the last half of my senior year literally in agony all the time with migraines. Apparently though, the number on the scales was worth ALL the side effects of the laxatives.

It wasn't long before I found myself completely addicted to my scales. I would literally weigh myself 8-10 times a day. I had no understanding at the time that your body weight fluctuates throughout the day and therefore I would panic if I weighed half a pound more in the evening than I did in the morning. By this time, laxatives were not enough for me and so I began not eating at all or eating very minimally. The pounds were dropping and people were telling me how great I looked by I was literally starving. I wanted to eat so badly, but each morsel that went into my mouth I felt guilty about. Peoples admiration for how great I looked was worth everything to me.....including my health, so the starvation continued.

I was never a true bulimic simply because I hate throwing up. I could never force myself to throw up no matter how much I tried. What I could do though, was drink until I puked, which I got very good at. My friends and I would go out to the bars and clubs and we would drink. I drank a lot....at least for my size....and every time I would end up puking sick and hungover. The weird thing was, I never liked alcohol. To this day I am still not a fan, but back then, drinking was a means to an end and each morning after a night out of drinking and then throwing up, no matter how bad the hangover, I was on the scales checking to see how much weight I had lost.

Eventually I couldn't stand the drinking anymore or the laxatives and I started to gain a few pounds back. Panic again began to set in and then I learned of a doctor who was an osteopath, who practiced over the state line. He was pricey as you had to pay out of pocket (can't imagine why he turned none of this into insurance). You would go in and get blood work done and then he would give you diet pills. Phendometrazine and something else, along with a vitamin. Yeah....that vitamin helped a lot. Looking back, the doctor was criminal for giving me, a 5'1" girl who weighed 100 pounds soaking wet, diet pills....but he did. 

The diet pills in my mind were the answer to all my prayers. By taking the pills, I was never hungry. I could literally go without food for days without the pesky side effect of hunger. I would eat something unhealthy like a bag of chips, a candy bar or a burger every couple of days just to keep from keeling over, but other than that....nothing. I was literally starving myself to death. I don't think I cared though because the world was giving me "positive" feedback. I say positive loosely as in my warped brain, my mom being worried about my weight loss and people telling me that I was getting "too thin," were positive. Even my dad told me I needed to eat more, where as before when I was heavier and healthy, he told me I looked like a "hog." No one had ever told me I was "too thin" before and I loved it.

It wasn't until after I met my husband and he convinced me that he found me beautiful regardless of how I looked, that I started to get a handle on my eating. By handle, I mean I began to eat regularly and not worry about the scales. Then after I had my middle son, the weight grabbed a hold and didn't want to let go. I did get back down to a healthy weight after he was born and then I found out I was pregnant again. During this pregnancy though, my body had changed so much and I put on a lot of weight. Following my youngest son's birth, the bottom fell out of my world and then the next three years I dealt with the NICU, losing my husband, a hysterectomy, a special needs child, a teenager grieving and going wild, losing my mom and full on depression caused by anti-depressants. (Yes....I said caused by anti-depressants and that is another story for another day).

My weight kept climbing and my energy was declining. I felt horrible all of the time and my doctor just kept wanting to put me on more anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills. I was in a limbo of exhaustion, hunger and frustration. Then as I was sitting in his office one day, I read an article about hypothyroidism. Everything in the article spoke to me. I knew this was my issue and when I finally got called back I told the doctor what I thought. I literally had to argue with him to get him to test me, but low and behold, my thyroid was so out of whack and so slow, it was helping to contribute to everything else that was out of whack in my life. Once I started Synthroid and weaned myself off of all the other unnecessary crap, I started feeling like a human again. That being said though, by this point my metabolism was so slow and my eating habits were so bad, that for the next few years, food was my friend and my weight climbed.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine talked me into starting a food program called Trim Healthy Mama. She had actually started trying to get me to do it two years prior, but I am a hard sell. I really believed that I would always be overweight and that fat and unhealthy were how I would spend the rest of my days. Doing THM though, I learned I was wrong. In three months I lost about 30 lbs and I felt amazing. I was healthy and I was actually happy and never hungry. I did well for quite sometime and then..............

This is where I would normally throw in a multitude of excuses as to why I quit taking care of me such as......a child on drugs, another child's impending surgery, almost losing my house, almost losing a grand child and the list goes on and on, but the TRUTH is......I just gave up and let life overwhelm me. It was my fault, my choice and although I might be able to blame my start on this unhealthy path on others, my current issues are my own fault. I obviously know how to live healthy, I just made the choice not to.

So the other day I had to go to the doctor for a tick bite(another fun story for another day). My blood pressure was a scary 154/114 and my weight was....well let's just say......not pretty. What the heck was I doing to myself? Why was I doing it? Was I not worth better?

Body image and the lies we tell ourselves about our body, our health and our eating habits can literally kill us, especially the older we get. So here's my truth. I am not perfect, but I am definitely a worthwhile person. In the big scheme of things, I still have some good years ahead....if I stay healthy. I have health problems that would be made so much better if I lost weight. I don't feel good about me, the way I look or how I feel. I want to lose weight. I know how to lose weight, eat, not be hungry and be healthy......and most importantly.....I am worth everything it takes to do it. I deserve to be the very best version of me I can be! And that folks is the truth!