(via Feminist Reprise)
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Stabilizing
Well, the altered dose of insulin is working out well - no low blood sugar episodes since I cut back from 30 to 26 units in the morning.
Now we'll see how that changes with intense exercise. I do my free weights in the morning, and about an hour of walking a day, but if I'm going to start the boxing classes again in August, I need to know how pushing up my heartrate for 45-60 minutes is going to alter my sugar levels.
Have an appointment with Dr. S at the end of the month for follow-up. That *should* be the appointment where we lock in my insulin dosage. It generally takes some time for sugar levels to even out to the point where you can gauge how different types of insulin interact with you personally (everybody's body reacts slightly differently, as I understand it).
Deep breath. This is manageable.
There Are Days...
As regular readers know, I've struggled with coming to terms with my weight for a long time. I'm always thinking I should be smaller. Even when I realized what a benefit it was to be 5'9" and pushing 200 lbs (if you know how to hold yourself, people get out of your way), I still sat around angsting about it. When you're told that any woman over 120 lbs is undesirable, you get a little jumpy (Sex is a powerful motivator; I like sex). Who doesn't want to be movie-stock beautiful?
Pair all that with concerned relatives adding their two cents about how you need to lose and lose and lose for "health" reasons, every magazine cover screaming "thin!", and a society increasingly worried about all the fat people (oh, no, *I* don't want to be a fat person who puts a drain on our non-existent healthcare system!), and it becomes a backbrain obession.
During some of my worst days, I'd contemplate getting gastic bypass surgery. For better or worse, of course, I would never qualify for it. The one time I hit the 100 lbs overweight mark, I did so for a very brief period. And here I am, sicker than snot, 176 lbs and *still* overweight by society's standards.
The rules weren't made for me.
And you wonder why this country has a food obsession?
Of course, the real reason I could never seriously contemplate cutting my stomach up until it was the size of my thumb is because I like to eat.
Oh yes.
Even while on the strictest of diets I could give myself a celebratory meal. I could go out and eat whatever I wanted. Oh, sure, if you do Atkins too long and try and eat a plateful of pasta, you might get sick, but eating it *is* possible. Even after I broke my binge eating cycle, it was still really nice to just be able to sit down and eat a whole box of macoroni & cheese every once in a while. B & I used to order great heaps of nachos and hot dogs and waffle fries and watch old episodes of Dr Who during the weekends I'd fly to NY. We went all out. It was great. We had enormous breakfasts at the local diner, and I could drink cranberry juice and eat bagels and hashbrowns all in the same sitting. It was a social thing, a celebration thing. We sat and talked and ate and ate, and then I'd go home and get right back into my usual routine.
For better or worse, I can't eat like that anymore. Not even on "special occasions."
Oh, that fucking shovel.
One of the things my doctor said to me the day they released me from the hospital was that I was going to feel a *lot* better once they let me out and started me up on the insulin.
He was right.
Best I can figure, I started getting sick sometime in late July/early August of last year. That's when I went into PP for the first time with the recurring yeast infections. That was almost a year ago. I have no idea how I pushed through this for so long. No idea at all, except through sheer delusion; an inability to link all my symptoms to one core body failure.
The increasing thirst began not long after I started continuously combating the runaway yeast (high blood sugar = happy yeast who thrive on sugar), until the last couple of days where I did nothing but drink and pee, drink and pee. My formerly healthy sex drive was unraveling for months before the final fall (I justified this with the "I'm so tired and stressed" excuse as well). Climbing up the stairs got tougher and tougher. I just thought I was tired. I couldn't get up at my usual 5:25 am alarm. I started going into work late one day a week, then two, then three. Me, late for work! The startling weight loss started, I think, in September/October. I bought new clothes at Christmas and more clothes after I dropped a size - a whole size! - six weeks later.
And oh, how I ate! I was hungry all the time. Sure, I kept to "healthy" stuff: yogurt, popcorn, soup, omelettes. But toward the end I was stopping off and getting stuff to eat that I hadn't touched regularly in over two years: hot dogs at the 7-eleven, BBQ potato chips, cheese dip & chips. I stopped ordering my cheeseburgers without the fries. I *needed* those fries. I ordered dessert more often.
I started noticing increasing problems with my gums. They were receding. And bleeding. I realized I was going to have to go into the dentist soon. I bought some Listerine, but that didn't seem to help.
And oh, the yeast infections! The never-ending, anti-fungal cream resistant fuckers! PP told me it was the IUD, likely. Just irritating my uterus, no big deal. And I thought, I'm stressed out. It's just stress. That's why I'm so tired, that's why I'm falling apart. I'm falling apart because I'm just doing so much. Trying to be better. Trying to be the best at everything. I'm just falling apart.
That's something I've been thinking a lot about since I stabilized: I was falling apart. I was really, really, sick. But there I was, flying to NY every other month until February, then flying every week to Indy. Doing my weights routine every morning (the last two weeks before the coma, this got tougher and tougher. I was just so tired, and no matter how I tried, I couldn't seem to increase my reps, and I wasn't gaining any more muscle mass). I finished rewriting tDW, cutting 100 pages, cleaning up logical inconsistencies. I wrote over 200 pages of God's War. I kept sending out stories (and sold two of them). I went to World Fantasy and somehow managed to get out of bed before 10am (and kept wondering why I was so tired). I started taking yoga classes (I also stopped going to these the last few weeks before the coma, as well). I ended one relationship and started another one. I got a work promotion that meant more responsibilities, more stress. I blogged right up until two days before I was hospitalized.
I remember thinking, this last year or so, how I just wasn't getting anything done. Everything felt so goddamn hard, and I figured it was just hard because, well, I had to work harder than other people.
I beat myself up because I wasn't writing enough, wasn't going to the gym enough, wasn't teaching myself Arabic, hadn't gotten back into boxing classes. There was always something I wasn't doing enough of, something I should be doing.
Looking back on it, I'm amazed at how high-functioning I was. Either I was 1) really strong and delusional 2) just delusional.
And you know what the worst part is?
When I got home from the hospital, taking the stairs one at a time, resting on the landing, my vision blurry, suffering from a massive high-sugar headache, I went to my room and opened up the closet and looked for my favorite sweat pants.
They weren't there, of course. The doctors had cut them off me at the hospital.
I stood there beneath the lintel in a pair of loose size 12 jeans, my wrists and arms covered in bruises and half-healed wounds, and the first more-than-this-moment thought that my addled, mixed-up, sugar-saturated brain thought was, "Oh my God. I'm going to gain all the weight back. I'm going to get fatter again. I'm going to have to buy new clothes, again. Oh God, oh God."
If I'm angry about anything regarding this whole thing, I'm angry about that. About that thought; angry that the first real thought I had outside of, "Take this step. Then this step," was "Oh God, I'm going to get fat."
I'd been given back my life, and I was hysterical about how much bread I was going to have to eat.
That's fucked up.
And then I sit here and stare at my lunch - soup, peanut butter sandwich, some peanuts - and I'm so hungry I could cry. I want to eat and eat, because even during the worst days, when my parents had money problems and we were living on scrambled eggs and macoroni and cheese, we were still OK so long as we could eat. There was such comfort in food, in abundance, in over-indulgence. It was something you could choose, control - or not - as you wished. It was warmth and comfort on a cold night, when the whole world was going to shit.
Now I have to measure out my comfort in half-cups and quarter-cups and teaspoons and chocolate pieces.
It's a small - so small - price to pay for being alive.
I've always hated some part of this body, some terrible fatty, imperfect thing about it. Some stupid thing. Now it's really broken. Some core system has malfunctioned, imploded.
All I could think about was, "Will I gain 20 lbs? Am I going to start the cycle all over again?"
And what I want to think, the place I want to be, is:
"How much longer until I can run out into the world and kick somebody's ass?"
Because I'm blessed. I know it.
A dead pancreas doesn't mean I can't write. Or teach myself Arabic. Or go back to boxing. It doesn't mean anything like that at all.
But there are days when that's hard to remember.
Whatever
Scalzi, on framing arguments against the same-sex marriage ban, instead of accepting the anti-gay-rhetoric of the right and engaging on their terms:
1. Same-sex marriage already exists in the United States. It has for two years. The definition of marriage in the US already includes members of the same sex marrying each other.
2. By pressing for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between men and women, it is the marriage bigots who are looking to change the definition of marriage.
3. The language of the proposed constitutional amendment would end thousands of legal marriages -- both the same marriages that legally exist now and all the same-sex marriages that would occur between now and whenever the theoretical moment would be that the 37th state ratified the amendment.
4. The proposed constitutional amendment would make second-class citizens of all same-sex married couples by stripping them of a marital status they currently enjoy, while allowing all other legally married couples to continue being married.
Read the rest
Life During Wartime
Good stuff.
Though I'm wondering where, exactly, all the women's voices are. I know they didn't all die passively in wars. The one-voice-of-the-ten who may be a woman talks about her servant going off to war.
WTF?
Regender! Regender!
Writing Women: A Virtual Panel Discussion
"Lately, I've been thinking about craft and how storytelling relates to social and cultural norms and values. One thing that both amuses and troubles me is the idea that when a story is told from the male perspective, it's considered universal, yet when a story is told from a female perspective, it's somehow particular to women, or must fit into a defined category - commercial, literary, etc. and marginalized or examined with scrutiny... and yet, women are presumed by publishers to be the majority of book consumers in the United States. One only has to look back to the outcry over the National Book Awards just two years ago for a perfect example, or more recently, to the conversation around the 2005 round-up of people's favorite books -- how few works by women or featuring female principal characters appeared on lists compared to the usual fare."
I'm ready for the panel that's all about the "troubles" of writing from a "male perspective," myself. After all, writing about men is writing about people. Writing about women is writing about "the feminine perspective."
Can we stop that kind of men=people women=Other thinking, please? It gets old.
I was a little put off by one author's view - "I would say there’s an invitation to the reader (or audience) – an open seduction – that is not the same with a male character."
So all women vibe seduction, but men can't be sexy? I suppose if you assume a male audience, you've got a Fear of Homophobia (cause women being bi is OK, but men lusting the cock is not) if you say male characters seduce. I'd go so far as to say that every great character in fiction is, in some way, sexy. They seduce. That's why you keep reading about them, no matter the sex.
And then there's this comment: "I also write from the male point of view. I do find a difference between the two perspectives. There is often something softer about the women's perspective; the men can be more connected to the world, less to family in my fiction."
At least she qualified that with, "In my fiction."
There are some interesting observations, however, particularly when they contradict what they just said three paragraphs up with actual experiences.
Gee, I miss Wiscon.
How 40% of Women Can Get Abortions & Then Ban Them in SD and LA: It's Always an "Exception" When it Happens to You...
"I have done several abortions on women who have regularly picketed my clinics, including a 16 year old schoolgirl who came back to picket the day after her abortion, about three years ago. During her whole stay at the clinic, we felt that she was not quite right, but there were no real warning bells. She insisted that the abortion was her idea and assured us that all was OK. She went through the procedure very smoothly and was discharged with no problems. A quite routine operation. Next morning she was with her mother and several school mates in front of the clinic with the usual anti posters and chants. It appears that she got the abortion she needed and still displayed the appropriate anti views expected of her by her parents, teachers, and peers."
"In 1990, in the Boston area, Operation Rescue and other groups were regularly blockading the clinics, and many of us went every Saturday morning for months to help women and staff get in. As a result, we knew many of the 'antis' by face. One morning, a woman who had been a regular 'sidewalk counselor' went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. 'I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!' she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to 'murder their babies.'"
Read the rest.
(thanks, Jenn)
Monday, June 05, 2006
Feminist SF Blog
For those interested, Laura Quilter and Liz Henry have put together a Feminist SF group blog.
Why, yes, I'm one of the contributers. I will be posting soonish (give me a little more time to sort my laundry).
And won't that be interesting?
Some of the Horrible Things that Will Happen if TEH GAYS Get Married!
1) All hetero marriages will be desolved!
2) All heteros will be forced into same-sex pairings!
3) All your children will grow up gay!
4) Everyone will get AIDS!
5) There will be butt-fucking in the streets!
6) Free booze for everyone!
I don't know about you guys, but I'm voting yes... for the booze!
You know, when Hitler began working toward the creation of a "more perfect society" he got rid of all of us queers and homos and loud-mouths first, too (and the handicapped. Do I count as handicapped now? Oh can, can I, puleeeeeez?!).
Let's have a big party in the concentration camps!
I'll bring the booze.
More Oppressed Than Thou
Meanwhile, the abundant pity that Muslim women inspire in the West largely takes the form of impassioned declarations about "our plight"--reserved, it would seem, for us, as Christian and Jewish women living in similarly constricting fundamentalist settings never seem to attract the same concern. The veil, illiteracy, domestic violence, gender apartheid and genital mutilation have become so many hot-button issues that symbolize our status as second-class citizens in our societies. These expressions of compassion are often met with cynical responses in the Muslim world, which further enrages the missionaries of women's liberation. Why, they wonder, do Muslim women not seek out the West's help in freeing themselves from their societies' retrograde thinking? The poor things, they are so oppressed they do not even know they are oppressed.
(via feministing)
Sugar Sugar Sugar
Well, today's the first day I'm going without the midday insulin, as my doctor prescribed. I was supposed to lower my Lantus dose (my once-a-day long-lasting insulin shot that I take every morning) and go without the midday hit starting yesterday, but chickened out. My sugar count is always highest at noon, and I hated the idea of staying at a count that was over 200, even if it was only for a couple hours (the Lantus kicks in between 3-5pm and takes me right back down again). I also hate running high at noon because I can feel it. My head feels like it's going to float away, and I have trouble concentrating. But I had another sugar crash yesterday, and rolled out of bed to find myself at a blood count of 41 at 4pm.
Fuckers (no, I'm not sure who I'm addressing that to. It just seems like an appropriate response. Perhaps I'm cursing my pancreas?).
So today we're doing the 26 units of Lantus and a glucose check before dinner to see if I need another hit (I usually don't. I'm often really low by then. We'll see if skipping the midday dose fixes that). I had to take a hit at breakfast because I needed to up my sugar for exercise, and it ended up high enough that I needed to take insulin before I ate breakfast.
I realize that I'm still in this odd feeling-out period when it comes to sugar levels and figuring what the right doses for me are. I'd love to take a little less insulin, because it means I can take out a bread item or two from my carb count. I still have Atkins-induced-phobias about eating starch at every meal. I'm working on loading up on enough dried/fresh fruit to sub out some bread. I'd like to eat my two waffles, bacon, and blueberries in the morning without adding on the extra half a bagel with peanut butter.
All that bread weirds me out.
Granted, the last couple months I was sick, I was eating like a starving woman (for good reason. I was starving), and I didn't much care *what* I was eating so long as I was eating (and drinking. And drinking. And drinking). Now I'm a little worried that I'll need to go out and buy new clothes again. The sooner the insulin doses get figured out, the sooner I can go back to regular gym exercising. This morning I had to chug some orange juice before I could even do my free weight routine safely (I need to be 100 or above before I exercise).
I will be the Gatorade woman at the gym, never seen without sugary Power Drink in hand.
Right now it looks like I'll be signing back up for boxing classes in August. I figure that gives me 1) enough time for me and my doctor to figure out proper insulin levels 2) enough time to exercise at home and at my regular gym and see how exercise changes my glucose levels.
I'm reminded of a phrase I often say aloud when I'm down about my writing:
"The only people who fail are the ones who give up."
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Bounce
Totally bounced two checks this month.
$400 in medication costs and 2 weeks of unexpected no-work pay will do that (alas, I'd already sent out these checks before getting the news that I was getting $300 less this month). And yes, I paid for groceries this week with my credit card.
Oh, I just got a bill for over $800 from the hospital for the endocrinologist who treated me when I first came in. Hadn't gone to insurance yet, so I'm throwing it to them to take 80% off. Looks like the medical bills will come in piecemeal.
Oh yay.
Here we go!
The Dull Knife
My second week of Clarion, I stayed up all night writing a short story about a women who leads a group of desert fighters on behalf of a foreign man she's sworn herself to. There were two kinds of women in this society - "women," who were the fighters and occasional mothers, and "ladies," who were the breeders/property of both women and men.
I got some flack from my colleagues for my heroine's use of a dull blade in a mercy killing (my Clarion buddies still make jokes about me bringing out the dull blade whenever I rip into somebody verbally or in writing), and more flack for creating a society where women only seemed to fight or fuck, so who was doing all the grunt work (um, the men?)? Overall, however, the reviews were positive. I had good characters, a good setting, some good worldbuilding, and a suitable plot.
I'd come out of my week two crit session with a pretty positive list of minor revisions. I was pretty confident I could sell this one.
Then it was week two's instructor's turn to speak about the story.
"I find this story personally offensive," he said. "I think it suffers from a failure of the imagination."
Imagine being 20 years old and having Geoff Ryman tell you this.
He was the first - but certainly not the last - person I offended with some piece of fiction during my six weeks at Clarion.
I thought I was fine with the "offensive" part. I figured that if I wasn't offending someone, I wasn't trying hard enough. But tell an SF/F writer their story suffers from "a failure of the imagination," and that's something else entirely.
Week five, David Hartwell had us all choose one story we'd written earlier in the workshop to rewrite. I chose my dull knife story, because it was the most successful and still the most well received of all my stories. And it had a special place in my heart. I loved the heroine, the world, the choice between loyalty to her patron and loyalty to her child. Choosing death and doing the right thing over life and betrayal of kin, and etc. I'm a sucker for sacrifice.
I smoothed and sanded down and sanitized that story, changed a few names, toned down a lot of the grittier scenes, and turned it in.
The response from my colleagues was lukewarm at best. The overall reaction seemed to be, "What the fuck did you do to this great story?"
I think it was my buddy Patrick who said, "What you've done is taken a story that was offensive to some people and made a story that's not offensive to anybody."
I'd started out with a story that had a few rough edges and some neat spiky bits. What I needed were better spikes and clean edges.
What I ended up with was a wad of playdough.
One of the huge wake-up calls I had after Clarion was realizing that I wrote salable stories that weren't selling. Before that, I'd assumed everything I wrote was just sub-par. I was aping MZB S&S stories, and writing them badly, because my heart really wasn't in it. I hated the Sword & Sorceress stories MZB put out every year. I thought they all sounded alike. Yet here I was, trying to write something just as generic (note that I'm 26 - by the time I was reading these stories, they were generic. No doubt at the time the first few were anthologies were published, they were new and different).
What writing my blood-and-sand story taught me is that is was OK to write stories that offended people, that made people uncomfortable. I've written a number of those since (one of the ones that offended another Clarion classmates is in round 2 over at Intergalatic Medicine Show. Yes, I would take a LOT of delight in getting into an Orson Scott Card mag, if only because I can think of oh-so-many lovely things I could put in my bio...). I've written some stories that I realize could be considered really, really anti-feminist ("The Women of Our Occupation" will be out in Strange Horizons sometime this summer, and when I explained the premise to a friend, he said, "So, you're basically writing a story about femi-Nazis." Oh, shit. Well. I suppose it could sorta be interpreted that way...). But ultimately, what I found once I freed myself of the "I need to write stories just like X" rule (which stifled my writing, made me unhappy, and didn't produce any salable stories), was my voice. I write Kameron stories. They may not all sound alike, but they all have some pretty clear pet themes. They may take forever to sell or not sell at all (one of my favorites, "Body History," has yet to find a home. What, getting oral sex from a disfigured body text is icky, or what?).
I got to thinking about this process after reading some of Kelly Link's writing advice:
The only thing you have to offer an editor, and readers, is you. Your voice. Stories and characters and narrative twists that only you are strange enough to want to write. Take risks.
It might take some time to start selling anything, but I think that in time, you will. Because in the end, all you've got is you. Writing another MZB story isn't doing anybody any favors. I like writing Kameron stories. I love writing stories like "Body History" that make me uncomfortable. I want to find out how far I can go, where and how I can push, explore what I'm interested in.
Not everybody's going to like it. They'll take your writing and try and infer a lot about you. They'll challenge your ideas. They'll call you a twat, a twit, delusional, weak, stupid, and anti-feminist (or "feminist," in that way that lets you know they think that's a bad thing).
And I think that's where the courage comes in with writing out stories that are so obviously pieces of yourself (they can't be pieces of anybody else, in truth). Taking risks means bleeding yourself all over the page, even if you don't think that's what you're doing. It means getting flak for things you may have done wrong, or things you did right but that other people think you did wrong. And you have to be prepared for that. You either need to defend your position or alter it based on the enlightened arguments you get from others (every writer gets to change their mind. Even LeGuin says she was wrong in using the "he" pronoun for everybody in "The Left Hand of Darkness." It's OK to realize you've made an error. It's called learning).
It's scary, it's risky, as scary and risky as putting out so many things about myself in this public forum. Perhaps even more so, because I think my fiction may say more about my underlying beliefs than anything I've said here. The subconscious works in mysterious ways.
The one thing you've got on everybody else in the writing world isn't talent, and likely isn't persistence, either. There's always somebody more talented and more persistent than you.
What you've got is you. Nobody else has that.
If you're lucky, you've got interesting things to say, and you're always reading, conversing, studying, traveling, to learn more, be more, do more, to have more to say, to formulate better opinions.
Because there's nothing so dull as a talented or persistent writer whose fiction is stale as old toast. Those sorts of writers might sell a handful of fiction, but they're not going to break out. They're not going to be names. They won't be loved.
Open yourself up, show us the world, and I believe people will respond. Maybe not in the mass millions, but enough to make every bloody word worth it.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Self-Medicating
Ran errands today with Jenn, and did our once-every-two-months-or-so Costco run. My blood had been running high at lunch, so I wasn't very concerned about it. I walked up our three flights of stairs three times, and for the first time in months, the idea of slogging up them didn't make me tired.
I grabbed a light bulb and the step ladder and went to my room to change the light bulb in my closet. I got everything ready and realized I felt a little dizzy. One of the things the big ADA book harps on about is that anytime you feel off, you need to check your blood right away. There's no "just give me five minutes" wiggle room. And I sure as hell wasn't going to be an idiot and risk falling off the step ladder.
I checked my blood, and sure enough, I was at 62. I ate three graham crackers and lay in bed and read for a few minutes until I felt better, then got up and changed the light bulb. I went back to reading.
Jenn came in with a pile of books to join me, and we sat around reading for awhile.
I still felt like crap. I started sweating and got shaky, and saw those little bits of darkness at the edges of my eyes.
I checked my blood again.
I'd dipped to 45.
WTF??
Drank some orange juice, ate three more graham crackers and lay prone on the bed again. I had Jenn give me one of the Lifesavers (oh, that's ironic) candies that I now keep on my desk. Ate that too, and continued lying in bed. It took another 15 minutes or so before my heart stopped racing.
Best I could figure, all the wandering around Costco and the walking up and down the stairs and the push-back of dinner by an hour (I had things to do!) threw me off, and my sugar level plummeted. The graham crackers weren't working fast enough. It's orange juice all the way, next time.
I'll be happy to start my new, lower dose of the Lantus insulin tomorrow morning. I think that's going to clear up a number of these hypoglycemic episodes.
What a weird disease.
Food Wars
Interesting article on the "food wars" going on in the school system . If the changes were about health, I'd love to get behind them: put more juice choices in schools, more trail mix as opposed to Snickers bars in the vending machines, making lunches palatable so you're not rummaging around for snacks all day and scarfing somebody else's pizza... I'd love a food program like that.
But having a pizza party once a week and a cupcake during a birthday party isn't the end of the world. And the more neurotic we get about food, the more we start encouraging binge and purge dieting, particularly in children. If you're not getting enough to eat or eating the right kinds of foods, you're more likely to binge. If you're getting the message that you're supposed to be skinny but your body's set point keeps bringing you back up into the silly "overweight" range on the bizarre BMI scale, you're more likely to start purging or cease eating all together (in my reading about diabetes, I discovered that many teenage type 1 diabetics, particularly girls, will take less insulin and keep themselves at a higher glucose level because they'll burn more fat that way, just like I was unintentionally doing before I was diagnosed. The problem with maintaining a high blood glucose level for a long time is that it puts you at risk for nerve damage [feet get chopped off], kidney failure, and blindess... but you'll be skinny, so you're Really Healthy, right???).
The more you try to limit a person's choices, the more you teach people to agonize over food, the more likely you are to encourage an eating disorder.
Food was a major subject in our house and among our relatives. Everyone wanted a say in matters of our weight. My mother - like, I suspect, many children's mothers - was always obsessing about weight and food. You pick that up pretty quick as a kid, and as kids who were just naturally bigger than everybody else, trying to "lose" those 20 extra pounds ended up sending all three of us into spirals of binge and purge eating styles. Sure, we lost the 20 - then gained 40, lost 30, gained 50. You end up putting more weight on than you would have had if you hadn't dieted.
It's taken me a fuck of a long time to break that cycle.
The first thing my buddy Stephanie's mom said when Steph told her I had type 1 diabetes was, "You mean type 2 diabetes."
Um. No.
The reason it took me so long to crash was because I was in such good shape.
At 200 lbs, obese by BMI standards, I was working out regularly, lifting weights, and for some time, doing boxing classes and jogging as well (looking back on it, I realize I ended my boxing classes about the time I started getting sick. I was just too tired to take that on, and the high-maintenance stuff in my life went first as I got progressively worse).
Now I'm 176, still "overweight" by BMI standards, and sicker than I was 25 lbs ago (working on being less sick, and gaining back some weight).
180 is a "fit" weight for me - below that, as now, is scary. It took me getting deathly ill to get me here.
But what about that pesky type 2 diabetes epidemic (type 2 being linked to excess weight), particularly in children? Well, it turns out those numbers are a little fuzzy, too:
We often hear, for instance, of a rising tide of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, especially in children. But the science behind such pronouncements is shaky. A study of nearly 3,000 children presented at the American Diabetes Association's 2005 conference suggested that a third of the children diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, which is associated with being overweight, were later found to have Type 1 diabetes, linked to genetics.
I would love to encourage kids in particular to eat right, have fun, exercise, make the most of their bodies, live forever. But kids know it's not really about being healthy and living forever. It's about being thin and popular.
When we approach the issue, seriously, as about health and not weight, I think it can be positive and successful. But as long as everyone's completely neurotic about food and weight, we're just going to go on perpetuating unhealthy ideas about exercise and nutrition.
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