This old commercial shows the AYDS Diet Chews. I remember my mom tried them. They didn’t help her lose weight. I tried them, thinking that I might lose weight. They tasted like Tootsie Rolls.
It seems like every decade has their own strange diet remedies. They were just as bad in the 1980’s as they are now. In twenty years, the Trimspa commercials will seem just as strange, except for the unfortunate choice of names.
Once again, Terry talks about diet, weight and our emotions. This time, she attacks the feelings of food as a moral issue.
She is astute enough to notice that she has made food a moral issue. How many times have I felt just as she does here?
“At the end of the day when I tally up the calories in my diet notebook, I feel smug and virtuous when the total is minuscule and guilty when it’s higher than the day before. I don’t just feel that I’ve let myself down. I feel like a bad person.”
When faced with 300 calories of Lean Cuisine or 300 calories of ice cream, she has very strict ideas. Dinner is GOOD and ice cream is BAD. Fortunately, she is working to change her perceptions.
“I don’t think the choice should carry a moral imperative. A once a month serving of ice cream shouldn’t have the ability to destroy my sense of self. But in the moral universe, it does.”
In the end, she’s right. Learning to love ourselves when we’re thin and when we’re overweight is the only way to have a healthy body AND mind.
“Beating ourselves up in self-loathing isn’t conductive to improving our nutrition. In the end, it’s no one’s business but our own. I can’t change anyone else’s judgment of me, but I can change my own.”
Good for you, Terry! Keep up the good work!
We are heading into the time of year when zucchini is available everywhere. Anyone who has planted even one zucchini plant has lots of squash to give away to you.
What to do with it? Slashfood has several recipes here. They may not be low calorie, so beware.
My favorite way to eat zucchini is raw. A fresh zucchini from the refrigerator sliced into little circles and sprinkled with salt is refreshing and low calorie.
I love this time a year for fresh vegetables. It makes eating healthy easy.
This handy little gadget solves the Nike+ problem. If you don’t want to spend 100 bucks on a pair of shoes that might hurt your feet on long runs, you have another option: The Shoe Pocket.
For ten bucks, you can use this velcro shoe wallet to hold the Nike+ sensor with room to spare for a house key, identification and a credit card. Suddenly, the Nike+ iPod trainer looks like something I’d be willing to spend my hard earned money on.
Since the Nike+ sensor is an accelerometer, not a pressure sensor, it should work in the Shoe Pocket. Other people have tried it and say it works great. I’ve ordered both and I’ll give you my full review after I’ve had some time to play with them.
Over the weekend, I wrote about a correlation between my bingeing and nail-biting issues and my grandmother. Our family members are tremendous influences on how we feel about our bodies.
What is your first memory?
Were you fat as a child?
If you were, how did you realize that you were fat? Did the kids at school tell you? Did family members tell you? How did your parents or other authority figures treat you?
Do you consider yourself fat now?
When did you decide that you were fat?
Are you fat just because you decided that you were?
Could it all just be a lie? Maybe you’re NOT fat. Is that possible? What do your family members say now?
The Question of the Week is meant to be an Inner Workout for you. Find some time during the week and allow yourself to write the answers to the questions posted. You can write them on paper, on a word processor or here in the comments section. Whatever works for you as long as you do it.
Keep writing until you find out something about yourself that you didn’t know before. I’ve also heard that it works to keep writing until you cry, but that doesn’t really work for me. Whatever works for you. Just keep writing until it feels right.
My grandma was insane about how “fat” I was. She was insane about my fingernails. Until about three years ago, I had hangups about my fingernails. I felt guilt every time I bit them, but it didn’t stop me. The only thing that stopped me from biting my fingernails was artificial nails. After four years of having them, I removed them and found out that I no longer needed to bite.
What happened? Can I get over my food issues the same way?
I couldn’t bite my nails: With artificial nails, I couldn’t bite my nails. There was no possible way to do it. I couldn’t even bite the artificial nails because they were so thick. I could bite my cuticles, but doing that too much hurts.
I got out of the habit of biting: Instead of biting my nails when I was nervous, I would click them against each other (an entirely DIFFERENT irritating habit). I eventually stopped that also. The most important part was that I COULDN’T bite, so I got out of the habit.
When I stopped wearing artificial nails, I didn’t go back to biting: I suppose that there was a moment when I could have picked up biting my nails again. For all I know, I will always be at risk for biting, but I didn’t. I click my nails together every once and awhile, but I am continually shocked at how easy it is for me to grow long fingernails without even trying.
What if I could stop bingeing just like I stopped biting?
It’s not like my bingeing behavior is any more psycho than my history with nail-biting and my grandmother. What if I could just stop bingeing and never pick it up again? What if I could just look down at my body and be continually shocked at how easy it is for me to stay thin?
How would I do that?
I have no idea, but for once in my life, I KNOW that I can beat bingeing and never go back to it. I KNOW that I can have a thin and healthy body without writing down every morsel of food that goes in my mouth. I KNOW that I can have an indifferent relationship with food.
For once in my life, I KNOW…
Read Part 1 of “I Don’t Bite My Fingernails Anymore”
Just in case you thought that my grandmother didn’t have as many hangups about fingernail biting as she did about fat little girls, I present you with this faded photograph. This is me in 1973. Unlike many of the photographs taken of me, I remember the day this one was taken. My grandma had taken me to a REAL photographer to have my picture taken. That purple-striped shirt was brand new because I had gotten too “fat” for my other clothes.
The photographer put a box in front of me and placed a baby blanket on it. I remember thinking that I wasn’t a baby anymore, so I shouldn’t have a baby blanket in my picture, but I didn’t say anything. He placed my arms on the box and I remember looking at my fingernails. I was so proud that I had been able to stop biting them for long enough for them to grow for the picture.
I was four years old.
Tune in tomorrow to read the conclusion of “I Don’t Bite My Fingernails Anymore.”
My grandmother was obsessed about my weight. It was as if my body was somehow hers and any extra fat cells were a failure on her part. My first memory of her is an argument she had with my mother about my girth and what she thought they should do about it.
Second only to my weight, she hated that I bit my fingernails. It disgusted her that my fingers were always in my mouth and she thought that I would never be a proper lady if I didn’t learn how to stop biting my nails and cuticles.
Eight years ago, I became a real estate agent. I donned the full real estate uniform, including the artificial nails. I wore artificial nails for about three or four years. I had those perfect hands that my grandma always wanted me to have and all I had to do was pay 20 bucks every two weeks for them.
When I quit real estate, I removed the real estate uniform, including the artificial nails. A funny thing happened, though. My real nails grew.
My real nails grew like they had never grown before. I would trim them and look down a week later and they were long again. If a nail broke, I would trim them all the same length to match and within a week or two, I had talons again. I wasn’t manicuring. I wasn’t painting, but after four years of having the hands that my grandma said that I SHOULD have. I had them. WITHOUT EFFORT.
Even now, I look down at my hands and my unmanicured nails are longer than I could have ever achieved before.
I don’t bite my fingernails anymore.
Tune in tomorrow to read Part 2 of “I Don’t Bite My Fingernails Anymore.”
Nike has finally fixed its online ordering so you can order the iPod Tune Your Run shoe pod and iPod controller without buying the very expensive shoes that may or may not hurt your feet
The pod is still designed to go into a special slot in the Nike shoes and won’t be easy to use with the shoes that really work for your run, but I’m sure there is some way to make it work. For $29, it’s a lot less expensive than some of the Polar alternatives.
For More Information:
Scott Adams is the artist responsible for Dilbert. He also regularly writes a blog. This entry talks about a massage he received from a very large woman in Reno.
Before explaining his uncomfortable massage, he explained that he wasn’t making fun of the woman because she was fat.
Let me be clear that I do not approve of making fun of overweight people. Those that mock the hefty are delusional because they believe in the superstition of will power. They believe that some people have a lot of this non-existent will-power substance whereas overweight people have less of it.
I believe that will power is an illusion. Overweight people simply get more enjoyment from food than thin people do, at least relative to their other pleasure options. If I liked food more than I like playing tennis, I’d be the size of a house. Will power never enters into it.
Some people are larger than others. Deal with it.
He has a point. It seems that people who are offended by overweight people tend to believe that being overweight is some sort of moral failing. Then again, the human body has such a wide variation that some people are just physically larger than others. We just need to accept this.
Being fat is NOT a moral issue. It might not even be an aesthetic issue. Being fat just is. It’s not bad and it’s not good. It’s just a fact.
Being fat isn’t set in stone either. The beauty of our bodies is that we can sculpt them. We can change the shape. We can test our bodies with diets and exercise and observe the results. Each of us is a beautiful science experiment.
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