fattypatties

Tune in at 8p on Sunday, Feb 13 to the "Curvaceous Bounty of Sin City" net radio show and hear Pattie and Carl talk about sex and our book!

Fellow Pearlsong Author, Pat Ballard will be joining us as well!

I'm excited about kicking off a new blog at the Psychology Today website. The blog is called "I Take Up Space" and is about the consequences of fatism. The site has millions of visitors each month, so I'm hopeful that it will become an outlet for discussing Fat Studies as an emerging field and promoting sociological perspectives on these issues as well.

I write about the failure of New Year's Resolutions and the Moral Panic of the War on Obesity in my first effort.

(Please forgive my cross-posting if you read me in more than one place.)

This month, I am participating in a ReVolution! -- Every Monday in January I plan to write a blog post here about my life and how Health at Every Size℠ has changed my life for better. This is the third installment of five.

HEALTH AT EVERY SIZE℠ AND GETTING OLDER


When I first decided in late 2000 to quit dieting once and for all, I was chronically ill with what I thought at the time was lupus (and have since learned was probably sub-clinical hypothyroidism). For the most part, these symptoms were chronic but not debilitating on a daily basis. I had flare-ups but had settled into routines that seemed to work. I had some sort of pain almost daily but usually dull pain and with regular exercise and eating good food and getting plenty of rest, I felt generally healthy.

I spent the first couple of years re-learning my hunger and satiation cues. I had dieted so much that I literally did not know when I was hungry or what my hunger felt like. In the past, I depended on outside cues to tell me when to eat and how much to eat. This was a process of mindful eating and, frankly, trial and error. I often waited too long at first, feeling ravenous when I finally sat down to eat and then finding I ate so fast that I was full long before I realized it. I slowed down my eating, learned to savor food and learned how to identify hunger before it was starvation.

In December 2002, I got pneumonia and became very weak. It was months before I could walk without gasping for air. I found a great program that started me working out in water with paddles and eventually I was doing 20 minutes on the treadmill and weight training in the gym. I became stronger and my metabolic health was excellent (blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, pulse rate, etc.). AND I didn't lose weight or gain weight.

By the Spring of 2004, I felt the healthiest I had in years. I was still dealing with arthritic symptoms and flare-ups but not as often and not as severe. When we went on the road in The Ample Traveler, I felt good and maintained that feeling for some time. I turned 47 that summer.

It was easy to believe in Health at Every Size℠ under those conditions. When I wrote Taking Up Space with Carl, I was confident and had no doubt that this was a better way of living than the 30 years I spent fighting my body's natural tendency to be bigger.

I sprang my foot in 2004 and had nerve damage that left me walking with a cane, but even that didn't slow me down or shake my confidence. I had so much experience with chronic conditions at that point, that it became just one more thing to care for with my body--an annoyance, but my view of health had long since changed into an understanding of relative health rather than a set criteria. So I felt I was the healthiest I could be with chronic conditions.

Then I turned 50 and the "other biological clock" for women started. I became menopausal, I started having metabolic problems and I went through a rough period with Health at Every Size℠.

The same conditions that are supposedly connected to fatness are connected to aging, especially in women going through "the change." I began to doubt my choice to not diet and spent many days thinking through the whole process. I felt alone in some ways because I had fat-acceptance friends who were talking about how healthy they were and I knew I was not healthy. In fact, it felt like at the time that I was turning into the poster child for all the conditions that they were bragging they didn't have. For a while I kept quiet. I didn't write here and I didn't reach out. I didn't diet, but my reason for not trying to lose weight was that I was thoroughly convinced that it would not work, that I wouldn't lose any weight. I had been down that road and it made me sick and I didn't want to get any sicker. But I wasn't sure about the new road and whether I'd feel better.

I did reach out to some private groups eventually and I began to see that fat women who were going through menopause and who had type 2 diabetes and other metabolic problems were using HAES℠ to help them deal with their conditions. I started reading about these conditions and discovered that there were strong indications that the dieting I had done for 30 years as well as the aging process probably contributed to those conditions.

Let me be clear about another aspect of this. It didn't help that I had little access to health care due to no insurance and it didn't help that I am an underpaid teacher who has to work several jobs to supplement my income in order to be able to teach. Stress doesn't help. Stigma doesn't help. Fear doesn't help. Isolation doesn't help.

So about 2 years ago, upon realizing that many of my health problems, including the chronic conditions that started in 1997, were probably from hypothyroidism,I had another epiphany like the one I had in 2000. I had been misdiagnosed because of the societal and cultural attitudes about fat. In 1997, when I first got sick, I had chronic fatigue. I couldn't sleep well. I caught one infection after another. I was oversensitive to light and had rashes from exposure. I had an abnormal ANA count. I felt like I had the flu all the time with my joints and muscles aching. It wasn't hard to understand why the doctor thought it was arthritic and sent me to a rheumatologist, who, like most specialists, diagnosed me within her paradigm. Thus, lupus.

Except there was one symptom that I ignored and my doctors ignored: I gained 90 pounds in about 6 months. At the time, my paradigm and my doctors' paradigm was calories in/calories burned. I was eating less because I was too sick to eat much, but I went from someone who rode a bicycle everywhere she went (lived 3 miles from school, so at least 6 miles on school days, probably about 30 miles a week total) to someone who was bed-ridden. It seemed obvious that was the reason for the weight gain.

However, rapid weight gain is a symptom of hypothyroidism and no one even explored the possibility at the time. Hypothyroidism mimics lots of other conditions, especially so-called "check-box" conditions like lupus (positive diagnosis for lupus comes from presence of 4 out of 11 symptoms plus elimination of other possibilities).

So as I face an aging body, I've come to realize that my aging process is affected by several factors: hysterectomy (not ovaries) at age 38, untreated hypothyroidism, and years of yo-yo weight gain and pushing my metabolism and immune system to its limits.

In the past year, armed with this new understanding of HAES℠, one that doesn't depend upon me being perfectly healthy to demonstrate its effectiveness, I have become more pro-active in my health care.

First, I bought a wrist cuff to monitor my blood pressure. This has resulted in a significant reduction of my blood pressure meds and a personal realization that my blood pressure and pulse are heightened when I go to the doctor. I take my basal temperature in the morning to monitor the hypothyroidism. I check my blood sugar often. I am faithful in taking my medications and supplements, including menopausal support. I use assistive devices without hesitation because they improve my stamina and overall health.

And most importantly, I continue to practice intuitive eating and try to move my body as best I can. I do not diet. I do not weigh. I do not worry about my body size. The truth is that under thyroid treatment I think I may have lost a little weight (judging from how my clothes fit), but that is an effect of taking care of my thyroid and not intentional.

I am not the spring chicken I once was and I am angry that much of my health was taken from me by cultural standards and socialization that has made my aging more difficult. But the answer cannot lie in now buying into that thinking. I believe with all my heart that if I tried to lose weight now, I would make matters worse. I believe with all my heart that dieting is not good for the health. I believe with all my heart that I dieted my way into disability and early aging.

I believe with all my heart that if I had known and practiced Health at Every Size℠ when I was younger I would be a much healthier 50+ woman.

I tell my story often because I hope it serves as a lesson for others. I told Sarah on the podcast this week that I was excited to see so many young people involved with fat acceptance because they might be spared the years of dieting and the effects of that dieting.

I think that history will look back on this period as barbaric when it comes to dieting and weight loss. We have abundance and resources and instead of celebrating and sharing that abundance, we have created generations of people afraid of food, afraid of our own bodies.

I have come to realize how strong my body is. I have abused this body and fought this body for years and it perseveres and even improves with love and care. As I have researched what dieting does to a body, I have come to realize that I could be dead now from many of the things I did in the name of "getting more healthy."

So let me affirm, right here and right now, that I may not be the usual poster-girl for HAES℠, I should be, because HAES℠ has saved my life and has made me stronger. Health is relative and has a multitude of factors contributing to one's daily constitutions. But given what I've had to fight and what barriers I've faced and what damage I've staved off, I am healthy at my size.

Had a great time chatting with NotBlueAtAll this week and you can listen in through the magic of podcasting. We talked about THE book and the current project.

This month, I am participating in a ReVolution! -- Every Monday in January I plan to write a blog post here about my life and how Health at Every Size℠ has changed my life for better. This is the first installment of five.

DIETING MY WAY INTO DISABILITY


For the majority of my life, Mondays were the start day. Every diet, exercise or personal improvement kick I tried started on a Monday. Monday was a day of atonement for the weekend.

Don't get me wrong. I was not someone who blew the diet on most weekends. No, when I put my mind to it, I stuck to the project. If I had never regained the weight I've lost on diets, I would have disappeared several times over by now. My problem was never "will-power." Almost every weight loss effort I did ended with illness. I would be working hard and losing weight and then I would come down with a kidney infection or low potassium or pneumonia. OR I would get very close to the goal weight and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't lose the last little bit.

So with each successive attempt, I got more dysfunctional. I tried laxatives, diuretics and diet pills to help with the last little bit. My body would rebel and start gaining. I've gained weight eating nothing but celery and grapefruit.

I get a kick out of stupid projects like Super Size Me where the person tries to prove that eating nothing but fill-in-the-blank will lead to all sorts of symptoms. I ate so many lemons in a 4 week period one time that my face turned bright red and I had to take cortisone shots to get the inflammation down. I ate so many carrots one time that my finger and toe nails turned orange.

Then I turned 40 and nothing I did made me lose weight. My last few diet attempts were extremely discouraging because I was starving myself and over-exercising and not losing weight. I had yo-yo'd so many times that my survivor abilities were honed to perfection. I could subsist on virtually no food at all.

I suspect my story is not that unusual. I suspect that this is the plight of someone like me whose genetic make-up is determined to survive. My non-smoking older relatives have all been fat and have all lived well into their 80s and beyond. My great-grandfather weighed 300 pounds when he died. He was 99-years-old.

I'm what my husband calls "farm-fat," hard working-salt-of-the-earth fat people who need the extra muscle/fat mass because they work hard at daily chores. I suspect that if I had lived in a fat neutral world I would have accepted this early on and I would be a lot healthier today. Probably not as fat, but still fatter than the average.

But I didn't grow up in that world. I grew up in a world that demanded I lose weight from the time I was eleven years old. With puberty, I put on 20 pounds and that is when the panic began. I attended Weight Watchers at age 12. My yo-yo dieting started early and went on for nearly 30 years.

My message, which I tried to convey in our book, is that I dieted my way into disability.

Let me say that again: I am DISABLED TODAY BECAUSE of MY DIETING HISTORY.

I think this is important to say because the prevailing message is that dieting will spare you from disability and chronic illness. But my metabolic problems occurred first and then the weight came on. (see next week's entry for a discussion of cause and effect).

Health at Every Size℠ is an approach that emphasizes health not weight. Weight or BMI is a poor indicator of health with little medical or scientific support. At the beginning of this century, I consciously gave up dieting and weighing myself. I threw out the scale and have only allowed myself to be weight 3 times in the past 10 years and only paid attention to what I weighed once. I started on a journey to eat when I was hungry and stop eating when I was full (some times called "intuitive eating"). I started moving for the fun of it rather than to lose weight. Judging from my clothes, I have not gained or lost significant weight during that time.

The biggest benefit has been the time I have for other things. During the past 10 years, I have finished my Ph.D., wrote a memoir, made several films, co-produced a radio show, ran 3 different companies and taught at a Community College. Mondays are a renewal day for me still, but it is a day when I look back on things I accomplished the week before and things I want to do this week. NOT a day of regrets or self-loathing.

Am I healthier? Yes and no. It turns out I've done a lot of damage. I got sick in 1997 with what I thought was lupus and what I now believe was hypothyroidism. Before HAES℠ I had good days and bad days. After HAES℠ I also have good days and bad days. Turning 50 was not a good time for me. I got all the fun menopausal, hormonal, post-50 metabolic pain-in-the-butt challenges outlined in the textbook and, of course, had to re-work through all the issues of weight and comfort-in-my-own-skin.

But this I believe with all my heart: If I had not found HAES℠, I would be dead by now.

Because of HAES℠,I have approached my health problems as health problems, not "lifestyle, self-blame" problems and they are slowly getting solved. And I remind myself that many thinner counterparts who are over 50 experience the same challenges I do. It is called aging.

So, I may not be the poster girl for HAES℠, but I am a believer. And I hope that anyone reading this will consider this way of life instead of the yo-yo life I've lived. I suspect I won't live to be 99 years old like my great-grandfather because of the ways in which I fell prey to societal beliefs about weight and health. I grieve this often and have a lot of anger about it. But I do know this. I will live longer for having given up those beliefs.

I wish you long-life and health. Stay tuned next week for more on my Life with HAES℠.

I used to want to change my body desparately. I knew exactly what I wanted every part of my body to measure. I mean every part -- not just bust, waist and hips, but neck, thighs, calves, wrists, ankles. I weighed myself daily and I measured myself weekly for a good portion of my life. Buried in my mind somewhere is an encyclopedia of the calories, carbs, fat grams and other nurtritional measurements of thousands of food items. I was meticulous. I was disciplined. I was often successful, losing inches and pounds.



But every time I got close to a goal weight/measurement, something went wrong with my health. At first, it was just colds or electrolyte imbalances. Each successive loss and gain, however, led to more and more serious ailments. I now know I dieted my way into disability. I permanently messed up my metabolic and endocratic systems. I don't have a lot of science to demonstrate that statement but I do have personal experience and I believe it to be so.

So 10 years ago I stopped trying. I do not allow myself to be weighed at the doctor. I threw away all my tape measures. I do not measure my food. I spent two years learning to know my own hunger cues and my satiation cues. I learned to do what should be natural. Eat when hungery. Stop when full.

After I turned 50 it got harder. Before then I didn't have a lot of the metabolic problems that are associated with being larger. I had health problems but they were not typical ones for someone of my size. Then I was diagnosed with a bunch of stuff all at one time. I wondered if I was wrong. Maybe there was a way to diet my way to health and beauty. But I rethought it all over again and came to two conclusions that do have some scientific support:

1. It is far more likely that the stress of stigmatization for being fat and disabled contributed to the metabolic disorders;
and

2. It is also possible that the fact that the hyperthyroidism went undiagnosed and untreated for 10 years also contributed to metabolic
syndrome.

I have ample personal experience that suggests dieting will not help me.

So after re-thinking it again, I came to the same conclusion I did 10 years ago:

I LOVE MYSELF JUST AS I AM.

I LOVE MY FAT BODY.

I LOVE MY SICK BODY.

I LOVE MY DISABLED BODY.

I LOVE MY MENOPAUSAL BODY.

I LOVE MY AGING BODY.

I am not and never will be ideal.


I'm posting this on Love Your Body Day.


I encourage you to think about what the world would be like if we all loved ourselves and were comfortable in our own skin. Think about how much time we would have to do productive and fun things. Think about how much love we would have for others. Think about how much money we would save not buying things meant to make us ideal.


This week has also been promoted as "Fat Free Talk Week" by the Tri-Delt Sorority. I have not really been willing to participate in this effort. I applaud the intent. I lived the experiences that they are trying to change. I exercised way beyond reason. I ate less than 800 calories a day for over 2 years at one point in my life. I abused diet pills and laxatives in efforts to lose weight and reach for the elusive thin body. I know how much of my life was wasted and I've paid a high price.


But I cannot support their efforts and I think that it is appropriate as I contemplate Love Your Body Day to explain why.


I am fat. I look fat. I am what I feared and what many people with eating disorders fear. Avoiding talking about fatness or fat is not going to solve the problem. The problem is NOT that fat is bad. The problem is that trying to be something you are not is bad. So while sorority sisters tell each other to love their average-sized bodies as they are by not talking about fat, what do their fatter sisters feel?


I have welcomed the support from eating disordered counselors and advocates in the fat acceptance movement because I do believe the stigma placed upon fat bodies contributes to the convuluted relationship most women have with food, health and their bodies. But the liason has always been and will probably continue to be a tense one. Many eating disorder counselors spend lots of time with clients helping them to see they are NOT FAT. In other words, the reassurance is that they do not look and never will look like me. They do not spend a lot of time with clients helping them to see that FAT IS OKAY. So it does not surprise me that an organization that is trying to stop eating disorders cannot see the inherent stigma is calling something "FAT FREE" asking students to refrain from statements like "I'm so fat."


Imagine how much howling and protest would be lodged against such an effort if sorority sisters were celebrating a "GAY FREE TALK WEEK" in which they were admonished to not talk about their sexuality in negative terms like "I'm so gay." To me this is tantemount to inviting white people to celebrate their whiteness by refraining from racial epithets aimed at each other.





So I encourage all the tri-Delts and all women (and men) to love their bodies and not to worry whether they are fat or thin or average or blue-eyed or brown-eyed or short or tall or whatever. There is NO IDEAL HUMAN BEING. There is NO IDEAL HEALTH.

There is only YOU and YOU ARE UNIQUE. Be who you are. Be the process. Be the journey. None of this will matter if you celebrate and grow and learn and blossom.

...this time there is an RSS Feed to my other blogs, so I'm mostly posting this because I want to jump-start my blog over at my Amazon.com Author page

BTW, if you want to buy the book or recommend it to your library, you can get more information by going the the book's manifesto page: I Take Up Space

Finally, if you've read the book, I'd love for you post a review on Amazon.com if you hang out there at all.

The book's page is: Taking Up Space: How Eating Well and Exercising Regularly Changed My Life by Pattie Thomas, PhD, with Carl Wilkerson, MBA

When you get there click on "# Customer Reviews" then click on "Create Your Own Review."

I'd love to hear what you think. I enjoy positive reviews, but even negative ones can be useful. Just got my "1 star" review this year and it was helpful because obviously the reader wasn't looking for what I was offering.

Thanks, as always, for all your support.