I think I'm fat now
Dec. 23rd, 2020 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerwengreenSo, up until I hit 40, I was a stick figure. Then I started having a better padded butt. Also a belly. This was concerning, but I didn't really do anything about it, especially since doctors seemed to think it was a good thing.
Fast forward to this year (8 years later). At the beginning, on the tail end of last year's housing drama, I was living at a place on top of a very tall hill 20 minutes from work by bike, or an hour by walking. I was tired all the time, but definitely not fat.
Then three things happened: I moved into a place that's only 9 minutes away from work by bike, or about 20 minutes to walk. We then had six weeks of hardcore lockdown during which I barely left the house. During that time, I got very elaborate and creative about cooking and meal planning, since suddenly I was cooking for two instead of just me.
Well, it wasn't long before I noticed that my thighs rub together. And it's REALLY annoying. I don't understand how fat people can stand this sensation. I started walking with my legs farther apart. There were also other unpleasant changes in the lower half of my torso due to having a whole bunch of extra flesh in the way of things, but most of it is TMI so I'll not go into detail.
So, suddenly, I'm a lot more interested in diet and weight loss. o.O These are topics that I pretty much ignored for the first 40 years of my life. Well, not so much the diet part - I've always tried to eat healthily (and we still do). But the weight loss part! How do I get rid of all this extra flesh! I'm still convinced that the vast majority of weight loss schemes are marketing traps, but surely someone has figured out some way to do it. If it's so easy to gain the weight, why shouldn't it also be easy to lose it back off again?
So far the only strategies I have in mind are: try to move more and eat less, eat less carbs, intermittent fasting.
With intermittent fasting, the way it's supposed to work is, you eat for 8 hours and then don't eat for 16. Most people seem to focus on only eating during their eating windows (during the 8 hours). In my case, I try to note when I stopped eating things the day before, and then count up 16 hours until I eat anything else. This mostly works in line with the way my body seems to view eating these days, which is: once I start eating, I don't want to stop. (According to doctors, I'm on a medication that stimulates appetite, which is probably where this is coming from.) So if I just don't start eating until really late, I end up eating less. In theory.
Then there's avoiding carbs. Right before I noticed all the extra fleshiness, I was eating croissants for breakfast. So I stopped doing that, and went back to avoiding sweets as much as possible. But now I ought to also cut down on things like rice, potatoes, pasta, chips, etc. I'm not into the keto concept which is about zero carbs - I don't think I could do that. But not eating all the things that are mostly carbs should help. Well, except chips. I don't think I could stop eating chips. Also, we eat ice cream after dinner every night, and I'm probably not going to stop doing that either, though I can definitely eat less.
And finally: move more, eat less. I read an article recently that exercising helps, but only if you do a lot of it. If I only exercise a little, I also want to eat more. So the trick is to pass the threshold where the eating more balances out the exercise, by exercising twice as much. That part, I have no idea how that would work. Exercise takes up a lot of time and also makes me achy and tired if I do too much.
I guess 2021 is going to be the first year where I have a resolution of losing weight. Or at least not gaining more weight. Egads.
Fast forward to this year (8 years later). At the beginning, on the tail end of last year's housing drama, I was living at a place on top of a very tall hill 20 minutes from work by bike, or an hour by walking. I was tired all the time, but definitely not fat.
Then three things happened: I moved into a place that's only 9 minutes away from work by bike, or about 20 minutes to walk. We then had six weeks of hardcore lockdown during which I barely left the house. During that time, I got very elaborate and creative about cooking and meal planning, since suddenly I was cooking for two instead of just me.
Well, it wasn't long before I noticed that my thighs rub together. And it's REALLY annoying. I don't understand how fat people can stand this sensation. I started walking with my legs farther apart. There were also other unpleasant changes in the lower half of my torso due to having a whole bunch of extra flesh in the way of things, but most of it is TMI so I'll not go into detail.
So, suddenly, I'm a lot more interested in diet and weight loss. o.O These are topics that I pretty much ignored for the first 40 years of my life. Well, not so much the diet part - I've always tried to eat healthily (and we still do). But the weight loss part! How do I get rid of all this extra flesh! I'm still convinced that the vast majority of weight loss schemes are marketing traps, but surely someone has figured out some way to do it. If it's so easy to gain the weight, why shouldn't it also be easy to lose it back off again?
So far the only strategies I have in mind are: try to move more and eat less, eat less carbs, intermittent fasting.
With intermittent fasting, the way it's supposed to work is, you eat for 8 hours and then don't eat for 16. Most people seem to focus on only eating during their eating windows (during the 8 hours). In my case, I try to note when I stopped eating things the day before, and then count up 16 hours until I eat anything else. This mostly works in line with the way my body seems to view eating these days, which is: once I start eating, I don't want to stop. (According to doctors, I'm on a medication that stimulates appetite, which is probably where this is coming from.) So if I just don't start eating until really late, I end up eating less. In theory.
Then there's avoiding carbs. Right before I noticed all the extra fleshiness, I was eating croissants for breakfast. So I stopped doing that, and went back to avoiding sweets as much as possible. But now I ought to also cut down on things like rice, potatoes, pasta, chips, etc. I'm not into the keto concept which is about zero carbs - I don't think I could do that. But not eating all the things that are mostly carbs should help. Well, except chips. I don't think I could stop eating chips. Also, we eat ice cream after dinner every night, and I'm probably not going to stop doing that either, though I can definitely eat less.
And finally: move more, eat less. I read an article recently that exercising helps, but only if you do a lot of it. If I only exercise a little, I also want to eat more. So the trick is to pass the threshold where the eating more balances out the exercise, by exercising twice as much. That part, I have no idea how that would work. Exercise takes up a lot of time and also makes me achy and tired if I do too much.
I guess 2021 is going to be the first year where I have a resolution of losing weight. Or at least not gaining more weight. Egads.
