I just Discovered an Amazing Website!

It's called Beauty Redefined, and you should really really take a look.

Some Things I've Learned About my Body

You know, every body is different, everyone is different, but every body is a little different, too.

As I go on this journey of body and food and health, I'm learning things about my body and I'm learning to accept things about my body. Here are some things about my body, they are okay, they aren't bad, some people will share each of these things, some won't. They are part of what make me unique and make my body mine.

• I have thick legs. From big thighs to big knees to big ankles, my body keeps width and breadth and fat in my legs more than anywhere else. My thighs will always touch, and my calves will always be big. But in addition to being large, my legs have a great capacity for muscle. I remember being on crew and having nearly the most powerful legs on the team, and now as yesterday I did 40 squats, 30 calf raises, and 30 lunges yesterday along with an hour of cardio and hardly a groan or whimper from my legs today I'm reminded that my legs are strong; they are get-me-places legs. I used to hate my legs, but now I think that it's very unfortunate that I had such a limited idea of beauty that it would even cause me to turn against myself.
• My ribs are wide from the front view and narrow from the side. This is sort of the opposite of what I expected or wanted when I was younger. There are only a few inches between my hips and ribs in my  waist so when I get smaller a lot of the smaller happens from the profile view, it makes my waist-to-hip ratio from the profile look to be about 60% where from the front it looks to be about 80%. Really, this is just how different bodies are. Would I be so bound to societaly approved idea of Caucasian beauty that, like the Victorians, I'd have my floating rib removed to make my waist look smaller from the front view? I'm ashamed to say that in my early 20s I would have considered it. Now, no, I wouldn't. 
• I have wide shoulders. 

Exercise

Yesterday I did use the 8 lb weights when I was on the stair machine. That was good as I started sweating after about 9 minutes and continued to the entire 45 minutes.

I still used the 5 lb weights for the exercises, I admit I'm a little concerned about the extra 6 pounds doing damage to my weak spot. Did the 40 squats and 30 calf raises. I feel a little tender in my shoulders, probably from holding the 8 lb weights plus the normal shoulder exercises but not sore at all in my legs.

I held the plank pose both front and on each side for 3 sets of 40 second each. 2 minutes in total. I also did 2 sets of alphabet bicycle crunches (A-A through Z-Z would is one set). Abs are not sore.

15 push-ups. Pecks are sore. Seems to be about the only part of my body that is.

I plan to get to 50 squats and 20 push-ups. Holding the plank poses for 2 minutes strait is also a goal. Not quite sure what I'll do after being on the stair machine with 8 lb weights gets easy, but I'll deal with that if I get there.

Update on Me and The Magic Eye Gift of Beauty

Sorry I haven't given an update on my garden. It's had its ups and downs but generally it's doing very well and right now I don't have to buy any veggies except maybe an avocado or an onion or some mushrooms from the grocery. Hopefully I will actually get around to giving an in depth garden update. I should be doing some very important other things so there's a fair chance I'll do the update instead.

I did my monthly weigh. I've now lost 31 pounds, from January 5th to June 11th. I no longer fit the medical definition of "obese."

I kind of want to discuss that.
I guess I'm not "fat" anymore, at least by a Southern definition. I know that the definition of fat varies incredibly. I feel like it should be a big deal, and for about an hour it was.

But... when I look in the mirror I see the same person I saw 31 pounds ago. I might catch glimpses of differences but overall she looks quite the same to me. No significant change of any kind. Other people see a change. I don't.

I've come to understand that about myself.

I don't expect to "see" a change.

I could lose another 31 pounds and I would still see the same person.

So, it's not about (can't be about) changing how I look, to look better, because my eyes can't see anything else. It has to be about health, about kindness to myself, because "better" is a result I will never be able to see with my eyes.

When I look at myself I always see the same "flaws" and the same body. I've learned that I can't create myself beautiful, I have to learn to see myself beautiful. Like seeing a magic eye picture, I have to learn to look differently, or I'll never see what I want, no matter how the picture changes.

I don't feel much different, but I can pull my knees closer to my chest now, and when I'm driving and I wedge my foot against the door (I know, if I get in a car accident it's going to break my leg) my knee doesn't touch the steering wheel now. Also, my clothes are loose and sometimes I can see some muscle tone in places I couldn't before.

The biggest change is my endurance. Work outs can now go 90 minutes. I can hold a plank pose for a minute (three minutes in a row with roughly a 10 second break in between), I can do 7 or 8 real push ups, the weights I hold while doing cardio are heavier. Those are the big differences.

Hopefully, one day I'll be able to look in the mirror and see a beautiful body, no matter the size or shape, and that once I can finally look with the right eyes I'll be able to help other people see with those eyes, too.

Eating

I'm going to post two entries today, because I feel they're pretty different topics.

First, eating. I'm convinced that I've been eating significantly less lately, since the spider bite (or there around). Let me tell you why, I didn't run out of food last week. In fact, I have about half of last week's food left, even staples like pasta and eggs and fruit and cheese.

You see, each week I only buy about as much food as I think I will eat for the next week (except for meat, which I buy two weeks' worth of, and things like olive oil and spices). So, if I'm eating about half of that in a week, that's a pretty significant decrease in food intake. I've also noticed that I'm tending toward eating only two real meals a day, with  maybe a third small meal/snack.

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure why this is happening. It could be that my body is changing, it could be because I was sick. It could be because of the antibiotics, or maybe the topamax. But here's the thing, the bite is almost entirely healed, I haven't taken the antibiotics in two days, and I haven't taken the topamax in 4 or 5 (which is more days than I took it).

So, is the lack of appetite the left over meds in my system, or the left over toxins or just a change in my own body?

I don't know.

Part of me is happy about this. The upside is that I'm not hungry as often. Not being hungry is nice as being hungry is unpleasant. Also, if this persists it means I might actually be able to keep within my food budget when I move. That's a nice prospect.

Part of me is uncomfortable with this. First, your body needs food to provide itself with vitamins and nutrients, if you're not eating much, you're not getting those important vitamins and nutrients. Second, I hope I've made this clear in previous posts, but I think that our culture/country's obsession with cutting calories is absolute bullshit. In fact, I think that cutting calories can cause the metabolism to slow and can cause malnutrition. I believe that it's our intake of "artificial" foods and specifically of processed sweeteners (both caloric and non-caloric) that have cause the "obesity epidemic." I think that the entire "obesity epidemic" campaign is a giant fucking red herring to redirect blame at the subjects suffering rather than at the businesses and policies that support produce and peddle and distribute the products causing the suffering.

Additionally, and especially, I believe that if you are physically active, exercise regularly, get enough sleep, love yourself, are socially proactive, as psychologically healthy as you are presently able to be, practice stress reduction techniques, and eat a diet largely free of processed foods and sweeteners than you are healthy. Healthy and beautiful. And you have a right to live in light of that knowledge. It doesn't matter what weight you are. If you're living like that and your weight drops, great, if your weight stays the same, great, if you weight goes up, great (maybe you're building muscle, maybe you were too skinny). I think that body-hatred and self-hatred is far more destructive to a life than extra weight is to health.

Soooooooo, when I look at my own body and see that I went 10 hours without eating on Saturday and was fine with it, I'm not sure I'm fine with it, but it's definitely keeping costs down.

P.S. This is a link to a really great infographic about the average calories someone in a variety of countries consumes in a day (the results will surprise you, particularly considering that the diet industry is telling women that they should eat between 1200 and 1500 calories a day for the rest of their life) that I think everyone should look at and a lot of the comments are quite good as well.

You Don't Need to Change Your Vagina

Body love is body love. Love your body, love your vagina.

Grown women have grown women's vaginas, and grown women's vaginas are bigger, and darker, and curlier, and hairier than a little girl's. If it's not sick, don't change it. Don't let a sick society tell you that there's something wrong or ugly about you when there's not. Stand proud! Be your natural beautiful you! And, if a man you're with, or who you talked to,is so indoctrinated that he thinks that the flat, child-like, plastic, porn star vagina is the only one he'll take then drop the asswipe (or, say "fair's fair" and ask him to get his bits waxed, his balls nipped, and his penis extended so he looks like the ideal, too). I know there are men who agree with me, and if more women stood up for their right to be unique and have beautifully unique vaginas then, I promise, even more men would agree.

But really. Your vagina is awesome just the way it is. Just like you.

Here is a link to a great article:
http://jezebel.com/5977025/unhappy-with-your-gross-vagina-why-not-try-the-barbie
and here's a link to a tumblr account that shows all kinds of vaginas (even some, gasp, hairy ones):
http://vaginasoftheworld.tumblr.com/page/8

Enjoying Coffee

You know that moment, that wonderful moment, when you take that first sip of coffee? The coffee from the big mug that you don't let anyone else touch, and the coffee is extra strong and just the right temperature, and you added the perfect amount of milk and just a dash of raw honey and it has that nutty wonderfulness of it.
sweetness to you and you can just get lost in the

You know what I'm talking about, right?

A Stupid Article and Why I Will Not Return to Urban Active

So, cycle started yesterday, and boy did it start with a bang. For about 3 hours I felt like my legs were balloons and my vagina was about to fall out. Spent those three hours in the bath, where I turned the water a rusty red, twice. WTheck, body? WTheck? Then in the middle of the night I woke to more cramping.

I spent most of today studying, and I'm about to resume studying. I just...I want to address a Yahoo article I read (I know, pearls before swine). It was something like "Diet strategies that just don't work" or "diet fact and fiction." I'm not sure. I am, however; sad that now Yahoo will write more bs articles like this because other idiot ladies like me clicked the stupid STUPID link. I hate Yahoo. I hate it with a passion. It is a representation of all that is wrong in our society.

I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of clicking the link again in order to quote it, but aside from the first one (I don't know what to call it, myth? Pervasive dieting idea, they were doing this "true/false" thing), about weight loss being harder the smaller you get. Oh, my gosh. No. I take that back. I just remembered. It said "predicts just how long you'll have to say non to french fries." FOREVER, you twit! If eating french fries made you bigger the first time then any time in the future that you return to eating french fries will return you to your former size. This idea that bad-for-you food is a "right" of the thin because thin people don't get fat off it, only fat people do, is a myth. And it's disgusting, and it presents bad food as a "reward" and abstaining as "punishment" for being fat, and ugly, and a failure, and socially unacceptable.

So, here's the deal, the studies say that the smaller you are the lower your metabolism is. That is; the smaller you are the less you can eat before you start getting fat again. And yet, we have this idea that once you're skinny enough you can go back to eating like you did before, as a reward. And I know I see plenty of skinny people eating junk food all the time. Are they just still in the process of getting fat? Or, do they have better metabolisms? Is it that smaller people have better metabolisms and bigger people don't? And that bigger people's metabolisms will, in fact, get even WORSE if they loose weight? And will never restabilize? I really want to know. Because this whole line of thinking is like a maze with no end.

Then it was like "If you work out you won't loose weight. True." And proceeded to say, you won't loose weight but you'll loose tummy fat and get leaner and healthier. This is the kind of BS I'm talking about. You WILL loose weight, when we mean "fat" by weight, because only someone with disordered eating/body image is going to think that all "weight" is bad. If I loose a dress size from working out but  no "weight," I am going to be CONFIDENT THAT I AM HEALTHIER. SCREW YOU SOCIETY. SCREW YOU.

There was more. The whole article was awful. The ideas presented were awful. Eat right, not because it's punishment, but because it's a reward. Learn to see bad food as bad. Learn to see good behavior, like being active or working out (and communicating effectively, and healthy body image, and good time management skills) as good. Forget these stupid bs articles, they lie.

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One more thing before I go. Two years ago I started at Urban Active. When I started I was told that one of the trainers would show me how to use the machines when I came in. So, on my first day I went to the trainer station and said I'd been told someone would tell me how to use the machines. I was pretty shy because I'd just come back from Korea and was still in that "passive Asian femininity" mode. So, when I waited a LONG time, and they had me fill out a sheet on my eating habits and working out (I knew I wanted to loose some weight, I'd put some on in the two months I'd been back), I didn't say anything, even though I had no idea what this had to do with the work out machines.

I tried to tell them why I was there. I wanted to know how to use the machines. When they said they were going to weigh me I didn't say anything even though I had no idea what this had to do with the machines. Finally a trainer came up to me and said I was 2 pounds obese and needed to loose 37 pounds, and that would only cost me about $40 a week. I was horrified, both at being called fat when I was already insecure, and being told I needed to loose almost twice the amount I had wanted to.  I just wanted to know how to  use the machines. At least I had the confidence to turn down the "offer" to drain my VERY limited bank account. He took me into a work out room and started running me through a private useful-only-with-a-trainer work out.

I said, again, that I wanted to know how to use the work out machines. He looked at me with this patronizing smile and said "Only the guys use the weight machines. You don't want to look like a guy do you?" I hung my head and said no. OF COURSE I WANT TO LOOK LIKE A GUY IF A GUY GETS TO EAT WHATEVER THE HELL HE WANTS AND HAS HARDLY ANY BODY FAT, YOU ASSHOLE!! I wish I'd said that. I hate body stereotypes  I am so embarrassed that I let that guy shame me. And angry. Angry at myself, angry at them. I never did learn how to use the weight machines, and I was too humiliated to ever go back and ask again. I spent the next six months working out two+ hours a day on the treadmill/stairmachine at the gym, until I felt like puking, limiting my calories to about 1100 a day, desperate to loose weight, going home and crying EVERY DAY because I still wasn't small enough. Never did loose all 37 pounds. Finally, I dropped the gym membership, because I couldn't handle it anymore.

Urban Active, you're a fat shaming body stereotyping bully and I will forever encourage everyone I know to NOT go to your gym.

My Breakfast

I'd like to mention my breakfasts, because I think they'll surprise you. Well, they may surprise you.

Before I do that I want to say that I eat a hearty breakfast, (brunch? I'm trying to wake up earlier but since I work in the evenings and have class in the afternoon I tend to wake up around 10), but I find it very difficult to eat 2000 calories in one day when I'm not including things with sweeteners. I've done a little math and figure that usually I'm eating between 1400 and 1800 calories a day. This is way down from the average of 2500 that I was eating a day when I wasn't on the sweetener fast.

Usually I have a piece or two of toast. But, toast, you say, has sugar in it! Most bread does, yes, but I eat Ezekiel bread. Not that I think Ezekiel bread is holy. I don't, I think that whole "we're making Bible bread" speil is horse hockey, but it is probably about the healthiest bread you can eat AND it has no sugar or sugar substitutes. They use malted barley (like in beer) to feed the yeast and all the grains are sprouted.

If I am hungry I will fry two eggs (cage free, antibiotic free, hormone free, vegetarian fed. Can't afford humane certified. $6.99 is too much for 12 eggs), and will probably add a little (like, no more than 1 serving) of shredded cheese and a hearty fist full of spinach to the eggs when I'm cooking them. If my stomach is upset I will also add basil. Olive oil butter on the toast and maybe a tiny bit of honey in the center for a little flavor treat. Water, or a cup (not a glass, a cup, 8 oz=1 cup) orange juice, or a cup of milk, or coffee. Maybe, but rarely, all of them. Also, a banana and maybe a second banana or an apple. I know, omg, I just ate so much! You can't hear it from where you're sitting but my tummy will be sending me happy vibes for an hour.

And after that, I won't feel hungry for four or five hours. Yay!

My smallest breakfast consists of a cup of milk, some water, a piece of toast with butter and honey on it, and a banana. The toast may or may not have nuts or coconut butter on it. This is my rushed day breakfast which I usually eat in the car because I woke up at 9:30 and it's my one day a week that I have  class at 10 a.m.

On really really bad days I will stop by Heine Bros. and get a medium latte (no sugar, no whipped cream, no honey) and an organic banana. All coffee from Heine Bros. is fair trade, organic, locally ground, and they're hardly any more expensive than Starbucks. In addition you get to feel like you're not ruining the world with your love of coffee, and you get to help a local business, and you don't have to try and remember what the heck "venti" means.

So, that's breakfast, or somewhere between those first two options is breakfast. I think it's pretty awesome, and for all the bajillion calories I'm consuming at breakfast, my body seems pretty happy with it.

p.s. lunch and dinner are notably smaller, unless I was busy and skipped lunch completely and I'm starving and ready to go zombie on somebody.

Lent Almost Over

Lent is almost over, but I'm not ready to end this fast. I'm ready to make it a lifestyle. As it is, I feel healthier, and if nothing else I feel more confident about my health. I also think I have more energy over all.

It doesn't hurt that since January 5th I have lost at least 12 pounds. I think it's probably more than that but I was waiting until the scale said I'd lost at least 10 pounds for two days in a row and then I was  going to throw out my scale (because health, not weight is my goal). The scale did this; it showed between 8 and 9.8 lbs lost for about a week, and then one day 11, and the next 12. Sooooo no more scale. I feel as though my pants have been getting looser, which I hadn't felt at all before. I assume this means I may have lost a little more.

Also, my hormones seem...better. My sister has a period every 21 days, which sucks, and my period had begun to follow hers, which sucked. Now mine is late (but I can feel it's going to start soon) and has almost reset itself. Yay!

Also, I did break fast once, (I had a cupcake at a dinner party) and had pretty awful stomach pain the next day. Not cool.

So, what I want to do is continue this; not eating any sweeteners except the occasional raw honey, eating less pasta/grain, and working out a few days a week/being active every day, for the foreseeable future. After Lent I will make the caveat that if I'm at a party or social function I will allow a little sugared food (e.g. the aforementioned cupcake) so as not to be rude, but will continue on with my no-sweetener ways.

I'd be lying if I said I don't hope to get a little smaller, but that is not my goal. My goals is the confidence that I am healthy.

I'm excited.