anna_wing | Entries tagged with weight loss

My friend who had the stroke a few years ago has finally lost enough weight that she can walk up and down the stairs of her house at one step per stair, though she still has to hold onto the banister. But she can now exercise properly (she was still exercising with short walks around her block and swimming, but found longer walks very painful), and can get into her clothes from two decades ago. It has taken a long time to get even this far due to a lot of work and family stress, and she still has about 70-80 pounds to go but it's progress. She's very encouraged, and already feeling better, and I'm so happy (and relieved) for her. Her doctor is a good guy, with a sensible approach to dietary modification (like keeping steamed carrots or sweet potato to hand on her desk if she wants to stress-eat instead of biscuits, etc).

Once she achieves her target weight, I have promised to keep her company while she goes to the ateliers of all the local fashion designers she knows, and has a celebratory new-clothes orgy. After which she intends to give away or re-size all her old clothes, as incentive to maintain her weight thereafter.

- The dragonfruit plants are fruiting again! Two from one of mine, and so far, four from the one in the office garden.

- The spirit-occupied mango-tree also produced some very good fruit this year. It needs pruning, so I was asked by the staff to explain things and ask them not to take offence at the gardeners, which I duly did before witnesses. So no problems are expected.

- A friend with interesting multi-stem papaya plants in his garden sent me some of the fruit. It's not bad, so we'll try growing the seed. Papayas are fussy, conventional wisdom is that the bird-sown ones that grow by themselves in random parts of the garden are always the strongest.

- I've also got seed for a nice double Clitoria ternatea in a lovely royal blue from my family's garden, which are now with the gardeners. There's a fashion for using them in tisanes, which I find vaguely amusing because they have no taste whatsoever. I grew up only knowing of them as a food dye. But if you put them in hot water to extract the colour, and add lemon or lime juice, the beautiful blue colour turns into a very pretty purple. So colour-changing lemonade is now popular in restaurants.

- My yellow Marvel of Peru/Four O'Clock Flowers (Mirabilis jalapa are blooming very well, and they have a lovely scent (moth-pollinated). I love them, they're so good about seeding and so easy to grow.

I have been very annoyingly ill off and on since April. Shingles, COVID, a really nasty cough that has lasted months (charmingly referred to by my GP as "Oh yes, the 100-day cough, it's going around"). The sole vaguely positive thing about this is that I have lost 2.5 of the 5 kilos that I need to lose to get to the middle of the lowest-risk BMI category, and through nothing more than being not very hungry. I might as well have been on a GLP-1 agonist for free. I have high hopes that maintenance will be easy, because if I can get to my target weight with just the current effortless adjustment to my daily calorie intake, it should stay effortless once I can get back to my regular exercise schedule.

I still have work-related meals, far too many this week, so next week meals at home are going to be chicken sandwiches or oden. I have now found a source of decent tofu, yay. Our version of oden is made with a couple of dried shiitake mushrooms, since I don't like bonito flakes, or occasionally chicken soup, and chunks of carrot, white radish, tofu, cabbage and the mushrooms, since I dislike konjac. It's particularly nice now, in the rainy season. I'll get Housekeeper to try cabbage rolls next.

Housekeeper saved a baby sparrow which fell out of the next and couldn't fly because it had some sort of fungus growing over one eye. She made a little nest for it, and its mother kept feeding it. eventually Housekeeper just picked it up and very carefully wiped the whatever away, and it flew off! So that was good.

The best part of rainy season is that both the nights and the days are cool, and the cats spend the evenings sharing a mat in a cat heap.

My friend who had a stroke earlier this year came over for tea. She's lost 12 pounds, 88 to go! It would have been more, but unfortunately she had some business trips with too much food and no exercise, and gained a few pounds back. Never mind, she is now seeing a personal trainer daily, and told me proudly that she has already lost inches around her waist. Best of all, she could walk up and down the handful of steps to my front door without help, which she couldn't do before. I'm so glad for her.

She wants to add a bit more cardio in addition to the exercises with the trainer, so I reminded her that before the trainer she had been walking on her treadmill while doing her daily Sutta recitations, and suggested that she put that in her calendar as an appointment every morning when she gets up. She thought that was a good idea, so hopefully she'll do it.

At a recent work event, I complimented one of my colleagues (a gentleman in his 70s) on his outfit, and he told us proudly that his shirt actually belonged to his son, and he had managed to lose 40 kg since the pandemic began, by walking 5 km in a big park near his house, and doing a thirty-minute workout every morning before going to work. He's been doing this for at least a couple of years now, and we all congratulated him accordingly. He has significantly reduced his risk of a serious case of COVID-19 as well, which is good. He's fully vaccinated, but medical care here is iffy, and in view of his age and previous size, it would have been an unnecessary additional risk.

He's still overweight, but hopefully not for too much longer.

I have cautiously restarted the swimming, which had to stop for the last few weeks because of regular end-of-monsoon thunderstorms. The lightning strike that shook my house a few weekends ago was only about 20-30 metres away from the building, which is practically handshake distance for a lightning bolt, so I am taking no chances.

In some places, the reaction from pandemic lockdowns has led to the return of some unfortunate, and hopefully this time short-lived, fashion phenomena. Orange makeup. Patterned tights. Large shoulder pads. Corsets. Micro-minis. Some appear to have already died the death (pin-tops), and I expect the rest will follow in due course. Almost anything can look good on the right body and in the right context, but some things are less flexible than others.

On the other hand, it's nice to see bright colours for suits, and the apparent return of women's trouser suits with properly-cut, straight-leg trousers, rather than those skin-tight numbers fit only for the Korean boy-bands of a decade ago. This is of some direct interest, since my tailor has retired, and COVID-19 travel restrictions have kept his replacement in Bangkok off-limits since last year.

From what I read on-line while losing weight, some people who had successfully reached a healthy weight sometimes found their new, slim selves very disorienting, especially those who had been very fat for a very long time. Being very fat had become part of their sense of self, so getting used to the change took some time. The ones who had been fat from childhood had particular problems, which I suppose would make sense. I never had that issue since I was never more than at the borderline of overweight and obese, and then only for less than a decade. But there were a few, completely unexpected things I had to get used to; none of them should have been surprising, but I was surprised anyway.

(a) My feet lost fat too, so old shoes suddenly fit again and new ones got loose.

(b) My local supermarket is on the first floor of its building, and has those sloping travelator things instead of an escalator (Google says that its proper name is "inclined moving walk"). Suddenly, one day, I found myself behind a full trolley, sliding gently and inexorably down the slope towards another unsuspecting shopper...I had to fling my whole weight back and dig in my heels to brake it. And manoeuvring a full trolley around corners suddenly got tricky too, when I didn't have those extra kilos as leverage.

(c) I've had to go back to being really careful with alcohol. It takes much less to affect me now, and it didn't take a lot before. My whisky-and-water is now basically whisky-flavoured water (at least it will eke out the good Japanese whisky, given that bottles of that age are now far and away too expensive for me), and my favourite cocktail now has to come with a jug of water to accompany it...

Of course there's all the good stuff, like the osteoarthritis hurting much less, and being able to get up off the floor without using my hands, or to kneel and fish under the sofa for Lap-Cat every night (he likes being flopped onto his side and then swooshed around on the floor like a furry Swiffer) without having to think about it. But now every time I do the big quarterly shop, there's this slight uncertainty as I load the trolley and head for the travelator down....

Even someone who is not counting calories as part of their weight loss programme should be able to guess that the calorie count for a nice New Zealand Envy or Jazz or Pink Lady apple (a perfect breakfast or after-dinner dessert size for one person my size), is not going to be the same as the calorie count for an equally-nice Japanese Fuji apple big enough to be shared comfortably among a family of six. One would think.

Not going to give the context for this, but really.

is not something that everyone has to do for fat loss or long-term maintenance. It's perfectly possible to lose weight without it, just by exercising more and paying attention to one's daily diet. If someone is already within the healthy BMI range, does not "struggle" with their weight, and has a decently healthy diet and lifestyle, they probably don't need to count their calories either, unless it makes them happy to do it. It's a useful tool for some people, and some people just like knowing their vital statistics. Nothing is essential for weight loss except ingesting less energy than you expend. How someone wants to do it, and how long they want to take to do it, is up to them.

It probably helps not to have a strongly emotional attitude towards food, beyond bothering to eat enough of it to sustain a healthy weight.

Courtesy of a conversation with someone who was convinced that they had to count calories to lose weight, and was convinced that they couldn't do it, and therefore was convinced that they couldn't lose weight etc etc etc. I'm not sure that they even believed me when I kept saying that it wasn't a thing that I had ever done and therefore I was really the wrong person to be talking to about it...

Baby bulbul is still around! Last seen alive and chirpy in company with its parents on Monday. We're keeping an eye out. The monsoon is about to begin.

I have gained 500g in the last fortnight, which I suspect is due to mango season being in full swing. Local mangoes are superb, and very sweet, so my fruit-related calorie intake has probably gone up. Never mind, it will go away once the season is over in a couple of weeks, or if I increase the exercise level a bit. Maintaining my current size does take much less attention than getting to it in the first place did, or getting down to my ultimate target BMI will. I am certainly not going to stop eating mangoes while they're around (the season for this particular variety is brief and intensive), and as usual, we're chopping them up and freezing them in huge quantities for future use. I am only a social eater of ice-cream, but having it permanently on hand does make menu-planning for guests much easier. Not to mention that everyone appreciates home-made ice-cream.

I discovered that one can lose excess fat from one's feet too. I should have realised, as a matter of logic, but didn't until I tried on a pair of mules that I had ordered months ago, and discovered that they were loose on my feet. It wasn't much, because my feet were pretty bony to start with, but it was enough to affect the fit. The local sandal shop (where I was doing more support-shopping last weekend) confirmed it after they re-measured my feet and updated my sizing on their books. It's not enough to affect things that involve socks, like boots and walking shoes, luckily, that stuff is a lot more expensive to replace.

Apparently there are people who think that it is unfeminist to want to avoid being fat.

I am not entirely certain why. Being fat is bad for you, and not just because it's a major risk factor for a bad COVID-19 result. It's better not to be, if you can manage it. There is stuff about "unhealthy beauty standards", and I do remember the models of the 90s and early 2000s, who were indeed shockingly and unhealthily underweight. But as far as I am aware, that is no longer considered the beauty standard anywhere, except possibly among South Korean pop stars of either sex. And obviously there are ways to lose weight that are sensible, and ways that aren't. But the precise chain of logic that connects all of this with feminism remains unclear. I have a vague sense that a middle has been fallaciously excluded, somewhere.

For any human being, being either overweight or underweight has higher health risks (and is also physically unattractive). It may be easy or difficult to achieve the happy medium of a healthy, or if you like, lowest-health-risk weight from either end of the gradation, but it's a worthy goal for anyone, male or female. Being fat makes every medical problem worse, just from the added strain on the body. None of this has anything to do with being a feminist or not.

I lurk on the the sub-reddit "Fatlogic" basically for encouragement and entertainment, but have just had a sudden realisation about a phrase that I've seen there, off and on: "eating for pleasure".

I'd always just skated over it, and assumed that it was simply an idiomatic version of "enjoying what you eat", which obviously is something one should try to do if one has that luxury, which not all do (even leaving aside societies with major poverty problems; my years in a UK boarding school, eating food that I wouldn't give a compost heap, and which has left me permanently at risk of mad cow disease, certainly taught me that...).

Then I suddenly realised that I had had completely the wrong idea about it all along, and it actually appears to refer to something quite different. It's not about trying to make your meals as tasty and pleasant as you can, or even the pursuit of interesting gastronomical experiences essentially as a hobby, which many people do. It seems to refer to eating as a completely separate source of enjoyment, like reading, or listening to music, or playing video games, unconnected with hunger or nutritional needs or sociability (I don't go for tea with my friends or eat pineapple tarts at their houses at Chinese New Year because I'm hungry).

Feel free to tell me that I have misunderstood, or indeed that I am an idiot for not realising it before, but in my defence this is not something that I have ever come across in real life. Is this just an internet thing, or a media trope, or is it something that really exists, like the US thing about eating huge quantities of ice-cream to get over one's boyfriend problems (which I thought for years was just a media/literary trope, until an American acquaintance in New York told me that it was real and that she had done it herself).

I found an old medical report from an office check-up, and realised that I was fatter than I remember, and actually stepped across the border from overweight to obese BMI briefly, before noticing and doing something about it.

So since the beginning of 2017 or thereabouts, through paying sporadic attention to how much I eat in relation to what I do every day, I have lost 40 pounds/18 kg, putting me solidly in the low-risk range and currently only 2 kg+ off ideal, risk-wise. Yay.

This is mostly very clear in my mirror, but there are still odd occasions when I look exactly the same to myself as before. The eye accustoms itself (this is how I got fat without noticing), so I remind myself that objective measures are the proper reality check. The bathroom scale if one is actively tracking weight, the kitchen scale if one is actively tracking calories, and most important, the fit of one's clothes.

A friend who has the opposite problem (underweight) is at the same spot from the other direction, so we exchange encouraging messages. Her problem is mostly food intolerances and general lack of appetite, which never recovered after treatment for a separate medical issue.

The Internet tells me that the last few kilos (or ten pounds) are the hardest, and this is proving true.

Though this is partly because I have not been swimming for a while. I know perfectly well that if I did, the kilos would drop off, because that is precisely what happened at the start of this project in April 2019, when I was similarly at a steady weight (just an undesirably higher one). I am now at the stage where further weight loss cannot be comfortably or easily achieved or maintained just by eating less, and requires regular moderate exercise.

18months of internet reading have made me understand (a) the astonishing level of nutrition and general scientific ignorance in allegedly developed countries, and (b) how much harder it is for people who have to simultaneously change what they eat (to improve their nutrition) as well as how much they eat (to lose excess body fat). Those low-fat, low-carb, keto, whatever, regimes they follow really sound quite awful. Presumably following a strict regime helps people to pay attention and keep calories in below calories out, which is how any diet-based weight loss happens, and also hopefully changes their tastes enough in a healthy direction that they can maintain the new weight easily, rather than going back to the old eating habits that made them fat in the first place, but it's still obviously much more difficult for a lot of people than I realised. I am very grateful that since my diet was already a healthy Asian one, changes in specific foods were unnecessary. Just minor changes in volume, so that I eat until I am satisfied rather than until I am painfully full, and that is good enough. I haven't had to stop eating anything that I normally eat, and I'm not hungry after meals, and I don't get uncontrollable cravings for anything; Binge Easting Disorder was something I never knew about before, and sounds an absolute nightmare.

Currently, I have happily lost another kilo due to a cold, which led my housekeeper to increase the rotation of chicken and vegetable soup for dinner, with macaroni or rice vermicelli, and homemade pork and bamboo shoot dumplings, yum. Going back to tai chi and a few minutes of body-weight exercises every day is improving my muscle tone, though my cardio endurance is gone and will have to be rebuilt once the rainy season ends. Casually doing leg stretches every night while reading on my sofa with Lap-Cat tucked into my armpit his slowly improving my flexibility (I'm trying to get back to being able to do splits), and as a bonus, increases non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So it's all still heading in a positive direction.

Further on the positive side, it is also true that once you are within the healthy BMI range, every kilo off is much more obvious, so I have ongoing encouragement from my mirror as well! 3.5 kg to go. I miscalculated before how much my target weight would have to be to hit the ideal healthy BMI of 20, so it's one more than I thought, but never mind. Progress continues.