Body image

I took some more photographs of myself today, frontal and side. I might still upload them but they didn’t turn out very well. I mean that in a technical sense. Things are not stacked up in my home office in the same way they were at the beginning of July, and I’m having a hard time placing my camera such that I get good mostly-full-body shots.

I do have a full-sized tripod and I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t just drag it out and use it. I can be short on common sense oftener than I’d like.

Not that I’m thrilled at seeing myself in a photograph anyway. It helps knowing that people see me every day and with the exception of one person several months ago, nobody’s called me names since I put on all this weight. I guess I must be passable, then. But knowing what I looked like at eighteen and how much I’ve decayed does little for my self-image.

What really got my attention this time around was the uneven boob size. Since I finished puberty they’ve been different sizes anyway, but it wasn’t glaringly obvious. Now, thanks to size changes and stretch-mark-induced sag, it is. The being larger and deflated I could probably deal with; the pointing mostly to the floor I might have been all right with; the looking head on at a torso shot of myself and seeing one boob seemingly half the size of the other (or close to it), well, I don’t cope so well with that.

It’s kind of sad because I didn’t have much to speak of as far as boob size when I was eighteen. Now that I’ve got boobs they’re not behaving. Oh, the irony.

Even when (I refuse to say “if”) the extra weight’s gone, my problems aren’t over. And it isn’t just that I’ll have to wear a bra to get things under control, something with which I am not bothering right now because I’d just have to buy another one in a few months. It’s that I don’t know what my midriff will look like but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a wreck. It’s that my jawline’s probably gone for good too, and it was never great to begin with. It’s that when you make your skin hold in more than it was genetically encoded to hold in, bad things happen to your appearance.

I’m trying to be optimistic. My face will surely look better when I don’t have ten extra pounds on it. It is a wreck at present. I look like I’ve gone without sleep for five years. I’ve got sun damage; particularly, a brown spot under each eye, neither of which existed five years ago. I’ve got what appear to be permanent creases under my eyes as well, as though I spent that five years tossing and turning and digging my face into my pillow. I’m a fright.

Again, I wasn’t model material at eighteen, but I didn’t look like this. And only some of it is normal aging.

So, sometimes I kind of wonder why I’m bothering if I’m going to look like hell at the end of this as well as I do now. I guess I will at least be able to say I can fit into normal sizes, which will mean normal clothes prices and being able to find clothes at thrift stores without too much trouble and so on and so forth.

I gotta say, though: I consider myself a feminist, but a boob job and several trips to the dermatologist sound REALLY good to me about now. And the idea of elective surgery terrifies me with all these drug-resistant bugs going around in hospitals now, but if I had the money and could guarantee I wouldn’t catch any of those bugs, you better bet I’d go ahead. I feel like I wasted the years in which I looked good through stupidity and short-sightedness and it’d be nice to have a do-over there, too. Barring that, I’d at least settle for looking less Night Of The Living Dead.

This extended moment of whining, self-centered vanity brought to you by WordPress. Hey, at least it was free.

Well, here goes nothing.

I was going to take the domain mylowcarblife.wordpress.com, but much to my dismay someone had disregarded the WordPress team’s request that folks not take domain names they weren’t going to use… so the domain I wanted sits as an empty blog, completely unedited and abandoned. *weeps* I could not for the life of me think of another name that wouldn’t sound hokey or conflict with another LC blogger, so I dropped the “my” from the domain name; lo and behold, it was available.

LiveJournal is great for personal blogs, especially as their security filters are very easy to use. Unfortunately there is something of a high-school mentality among many of the users at that site, LJ is not taken terribly seriously in the rest of the blogosphere, and it can be difficult to drum up an audience if you want to do a specialty blog. I don’t need a multitude of usericons here; I’m only here to write about my experiences and share info with others. Also, my LJ audience doesn’t seem terribly interested in my weekly weight loss adventures other than the occasional “Atta girl!” when I’ve lost a few pounds. So, overall the specialty blog approach on a “real” blog site seems best. We’ll see how this goes.

I have attempted Atkins three times. The first time, in January 2004, I stayed on plan for at least four weeks. I did not have a scale at that time to measure weight changes but it seemed to me I was losing inches already. At that time I stayed pretty much in the 180-pound range at 5′6″, so I needed to lose weight but it wasn’t desperate.

The second time was two years ago when I realized my weight was ballooning. I had had my second child in November 2004 (I had quit Atkins before finding out I was pregnant–and I mean just), and while I originally got down to my prepregnancy weight with seemingly no effort whatsoever, the pounds started coming back on soon after. By the time my daughter was two months old I was just over two hundred pounds, as the scale testified at my postpartum visit. At roughly the same time it seemed like I was losing a lot of hair, which may have been hormonal changes, but my skin was also dry and scaly in weird places. I suspected thyroid issues, as did others close to me, but when I got tested I was told the results were normal. I was on Medicaid at the time and the doctor seemed dismissive, so who knows what was going on there; I know now that TSH is not the only possible indicator of thyroid problems, and that you can have a normal TSH and still be hypothyroid. I don’t have insurance at this point and I’m losing weight on Atkins now, so it’s pretty much moot until I can get coverage again or get taken seriously at a free clinic.

Anyway, so by that summer I finally got hold of a scale and was unpleasantly shocked to discover that not only was I over 200 but creeping ever closer to 250! I don’t remember now exactly what my weight was but it was a jarring discovery. Hence starting Atkins again. I was nursing my daughter and was aware that Dr. Atkins had recommended against nursing mothers attempting the diet, but I had done my homework and learned that mothers in famine conditions still produce nutritionally perfect milk, and I knew I would be eating better than a mother in famine conditions.

Unfortunately, the whole thing backfired. Induction was tremendously difficult, I was trying to take care of a young baby mostly by myself, I was stressing out over a little cat family I had taken in to keep them out of the shelters (they were tearing up everything, it seemed like), and to top it off my daughter was starting to complain when she nursed. I suspect I smelled funny to her once I achieved ketosis, and she was too young to know that it was OK, just Mommy smelling different. I couldn’t take the stress after a couple of days and gave up.

This time around my daughter is two and a half, I have better emotional and logistical support with my life in general, and I got a rude awakening when I went to a local festival and visited a diabetes advocacy organization’s booth. My first non-fasting glucose number was 54; the second was 39, which is the highest end of normal range. I’m not sure why the numbers varied so greatly within thirty seconds of one another, but even high normal is scary with my family history. Everybody female in my mother’s line plus aunts and possibly a sister or two of hers is diabetic, Mom’s father is diabetic, and my father was diagnosed with Type 2 at the end of 2005. Then came the high nonfasting number and I knew I’d better get my butt in gear or I was facing serious health problems in another three to five years. And that’s being generous.

It isn’t that I think being fat is going to cause my diabetes. This is something that I think even some medical personnel don’t quite understand: Obesity is a symptom of underlying health issues which lead to diabetes, not necessarily a cause. If being fat always caused diabetes then there shouldn’t be any skinny people out there with hyperinsulinemia, which is a symptom of insulin resistance and a precursor to type 2 diabetes–but there are. So while I don’t like being this overweight and wouldn’t mind looking better (to me, anyway), the truth is that the changes I need to make to stave off diabetes are going to be the same changes I’d need to lose the extra weight, just as your runny nose goes away when your body kills off a cold.

So, this time around I began at the beginning of July. My starting weight was 237.5. Yesterday I weighed in at 224.5, a loss of thirteen pounds. That’s a loss of 2.6 pounds per week. I lost more in Induction phase and I had a week or two where I appeared to stall, but 2.6 a week is nothing to sneeze at. If I kept up at that pace I would lose all the weight I needed to lose in just under a year, or by eleven months from now. I will probably not continue losing at that pace, because sooner or later in the Ongoing Weight Loss phase you slow down significantly from your original loss pace, but that’s all right. I feel better already and can do things like change the bedsheets without winding myself, and that’s just with a thirteen-pound loss so I certainly can’t complain!

“Before” photos, beginning measurements, and a summary of how I’ve done so far are forthcoming. I hope you will follow along with me on my journey and that we both learn something positive from it.