The Low-Carb Curmudgeon

Not middle-aged, but needing a cure

Dana Seilhan — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:58:31 +0000

I got Dr. and Dr. Eades’s new book a while back, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast!. With my recent experiences it’s becoming plain to me that a shake-driven plan might work better for me in the first couple of weeks. I’ll dirty fewer dishes and have to plan fewer meals. Works for me.

So I was hunting around for a whey protein I could live with. I found this: EAS Dietary Supplement, 100% Whey Protein 32 oz (2 lb) 0.9 kg

Netrition had a decent price on it, and I may go back to them later if I have to. But I found it on sale at Target for between $18 and $19. For some reason, it’s on clearance. I’m sad. But after payday I may go back and grab whatever they might have left.

I tried an experimental vanilla and caramel (sugar-free Toriani’s) shake last night, which was too sweet with 2 tbsp of the syrup so I tried the chocolate today with one. Works great. It is not high-end chocolate or even Hershey’s but it works fine for me. The vanilla is pretty yummy. One of the shake variation recipes calls for frozen berries and I bet the vanilla would kick. ass. with those.

Yeah, it’s fake food; yeah, there’s a little soy in it, but that’s the last ingredient in the list, which is pretty impressive for a protein powder. And no aspartame. I’m happy to note that at least with their whey protein, EAS is no longer drinking the NutraSweet Kool-Aid. (Let’s see how many trademarks I can abuse in one blog post!)

If you’re thinking of trying the 6-Week Cure, this protein powder meets the requirements of two of the ingredients in the shake. It has more than 15g protein per scoop, plus it has 2500mg of leucine per scoop, which is something else they want you to add to the shake. You’ll actually be getting more of it now than was originally called for. But if you’re a weak little noodle-arms like me, it’ll probably do you a bit of good. And it’s only for two weeks. Not too shabby.

No strawberry flavor, but strawberry flavor is easy to mess up. I can live without it.

Best part? The other adult in the house gets nasty headaches from sucralose. This stuff is ALL MINE. Muahahahaha!

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Note: No one asked me to do this review. I chose to do it because I like the product. I’m terrible at meeting deadlines anyway, so asking me to do a review for you might be kind of futile unless you don’t care when I get it done. I did, however, use Amazon affiliate links in this post.

Note the second: How many different ways can I say “works for me” in one post? Wow. I am a shitty writer.

I hate healthy eating

Dana Seilhan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:26:19 +0000

I know, it’s a provocative thing to say. I hate healthy eating. Those four words carry so much meaning for so many people. They also speak volumes about me. To most people they translate as something like

“No wonder she’s fat”

“She doesn’t care enough to take care of herself”

because that’s just how most people roll in this culture, we’re all trying to be armchair Dr. Phils and shit*.

I’m not going to apologize for having feelings about something. Fuck that. I beat myself up enough as it is, but I’m in no mood to put on that kind of show today. But I’m cool with explaining further. What I hate about healthy eating isn’t the healthy eating itself. I hate that every time I attempt this I wind up feeling more than a little bit psychotic.

On the one paw, I get into a headspace where I want to nitpick every little thing that goes into my mouth. You know, we get these messages from society that we’re supposed to watch what we eat or we won’t be healthy, which is actually logical since for the last 10,000 years we have had an experience unusual in human history of having to choose between blatantly unhealthy foods that don’t immediately sicken or kill us, and the type of healthy foods which we evolved eating. 10,000 years isn’t long enough for us to have adapted responses to this that don’t make us feel crazy–mostly because having to deal with the situation is not an immediate life-or-death decision. (It tends to be the mutations or environmental changes that result in immediate death which shape our evolution one way or the other.) So it makes sense that what you eat affects your health and therefore we should make good choices, but the process of choosing can still make a person neurotic, because we should be able to eat anything edible within our immediate environment and still be healthy. That’s what our evolutionary experience tells us, but it doesn’t reflect reality anymore. It’s maddening. I shouldn’t have to measure every damn thing that goes into my mouth. I should just be able to eat til I’m full. ARGH.

The other crazymaker for me is that I go through phases of defiance against the whole affair. I’ve sort of stepped back mentally and assessed, as neutrally as possible, what my mental state is when I decide to eat things that are unhealthy for me. What seems to happen is I get fed up with the situation in the kitchen, or the fact we haven’t seriously grocery-shopped in three weeks, and don’t feel like cobbling something together, and I wind up going, “Fuck it, I don’t care, let’s just order a pizza, I LOVE pizza goddamn it, and I’ll eat it if I like.” Then afterward I wonder what the fuck I was thinking, as I start bloating up and my joints start aching and I generally feel like crap. (If I don’t have celiac or at least gluten sensitivity on top of the extreme metabolic response to carb intake, I’ll be very surprised.)

I hate all this shit. I wish I could just eat the foods I like and be fine. I’m tired of it. I can’t even imagine myself slender again. I don’t see how I could ever possibly get there.

I know everyone who has 100 pounds to lose goes through this, or something like it, therefore I’m not special or anything. Granted. I just had to vent. This is what goes on with me. I know the theory, I could quote chapter and verse at you all day… but when it comes time to implement, I woefully fall short.

And I hate it. And I hate healthy eating. A whole lot.

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*Which is pathetic because the guy’s already making a living as an armchair psychologist (amazingly he has a degree in psychology, unlike a lot of these TV bozos, but he diagnoses people he’s never even met, which is not cool in my book) and now everyone else wants to be like him, which is sort of like being a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy. How’s it feel to be faded with indistinct details and lots of blemishes? Think for yourself for once.

Wednesday weigh-in: 244

Dana Seilhan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:41:49 +0000

I am writing this on Thursday but I actually did the weigh-in on Wednesday so here you go. I didn’t get on my computer all day until yesterday evening when we were about to go to the library, and logged in then only so I could make sure nothing I had out was overdue.

248.5 | 244 | 140

The past couple of weeks have been awful. I need to just take a day or two and bear down hard on that kitchen. I am SO ANGRY about that. If Matt cooks, the unspoken implication is that I’m supposed to clean up. Which is fair. It makes things easier on everyone. But then, if I cook–and I really need to cook most nights if I’m low-carbing so I know what I’m getting–then I also have to clean up then too, because God knows he doesn’t lift a finger. You might recall me stating that while my workload has increased something like threefold since we moved into this house (I went from an apartment flat to a two-story house with a basement, so three floors in all), his has not. He’s not a hardass about it, but as he’s the one paying the bills, I don’t like to give him too much crap.

Still. It’s bullshit. If you’re the breadwinner in your household but you won’t even pick your socks up off the floor (true story–he doesn’t), there is something wrong with you. If you want a maid, suck it up and pay the other adult for their time and trouble. If you just want them to do their share, their share is NOT everything that doesn’t involve your paying job. Grow the fuck up. They are not getting paid to do your job, and in this economy it’s likely they can’t get their own, so give a little to get a lot, or do your own share.

(He does give me an allowance, but it works out most months to something like $500 a month. That’s not even minimum wage. Then, on top of that, he spends himself down to zero and guess who winds up buying groceries about half the time? Three guesses and the first two don’t count.)

This is what is really getting me right now, it’s twofold: one, it’s really hard to low-carb with anything but a salad if the kitchen’s a fucking disaster. Two, it’s really hard to low-carb when the other adult brings home snacks for the kiddo like rice crackers, especially when you like rice crackers a lot.

There are other problems, like me giving up too easily. Sort of. I’m not walking away from this. It’s a pothole in the road, not a detour and I have not turned around and gone home.

Doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed about the two-pound gain. My one consolation is that at least some of it may be water weight. I’ve had swelling in my hands and feet the past couple of days.

Meh. Back to the drawing board.

You should lose the fat in your head too

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:32:54 +0000

Can someone out there please explain to me what the hell it is with low-carb bloggers and global warming? I’ve been seeing this all over the place for the past year or so. Apparently, because The Establishment is wrong about healthy diets, it is also wrong about climate change, and furthermore anyone in government who panics about global warming is a dirty, dirty fascist out to destroy the Western way of life.

I guess, to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Too bad we’re all getting screwed.

One of the more prominent LC global warming denialists is Dr. Barry Groves, of Second Opinion in the UK. I’m not trying to pick on him, I actually love reading his dietary stuff, but I don’t feel like going round hunting down a bunch of anti-GW (global warming, not George W.–oh, if only! once more a classic case of misplaced ire!) statements from LC bloggers at 3 in the morning when I’m already in sleep deficit. I’ve been carbin’ again and OMFG does my body hate me. So, easy it is.

I don’t have a lot of time to get into his stuff right now and I probably shouldn’t get too far into it in the first place because it’s off-topic here. I just wanted to touch on a few things briefly. The section on his site about “the man-made global warming scam” is here if you want to read it.

Before I begin let me state that I am not a climate scientist. The extent of my knowledge comes from random reading over the years and an earth science class when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was then that I learned about the carbon cycle, something I don’t often hear mentioned by climate change denialists. And that’s being kind. I actually don’t think I’ve heard anything about it at all from them, but it’s possible I did and have forgotten.

Ignore the carbon cycle and as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have much else to tell me because you’re full of shit.

Be that as it may.

First off, Groves trumpets this part of his site as though it proves without a doubt that the idea of human-caused global warming is a scam. Then you get into the introductory paragraphs and find this gem:

I say ’scam’ because that is exactly what it appears to be to me.

Dude, if you’re going to call something a scam, you better have something more substantial to go on than what you think you’re seeing.

He links to a video of a documentary about scientists–I guess, anyway, as unlike with U.S. television documentaries they don’t apply an introductory caption with the person’s name and title–who do not agree that the science on climate change is settled. I didn’t have three-quarters of an hour to get into the video. I might later, I might not. I hate watching videos on my laptop because then my daughter whines to watch cartoons on YouTube. And, as previously stated, I’ve stayed up three hours too late.

Be that as it may, I got enough of the video to catch some “expert”(?) stating that the science on climate change is, in his words, “not complete.”

That pretty much did it for me right there. I admit I am not a scientist by trade, but anyone who tells you that ANY scientific discipline has “complete” data and has completely figured out everything that that discipline is supposed to study, should go into a one-person home-based business as a manure dispenser. They’re so full of it I fear they will burst at any second. At least this way they can do an end run around the bad economy, what with so many taking up gardening now…

Then you had the random arguments about how all this shit that the IPCC wants us to do is going to be “expensive” and might not even do any good. Oh my GOD, we might have to do something that costs MONEY if this global warming thing is real, y’all! Then again, these people tend to be upheld as heroes by folks who expect us all to take a similar position with health care. If it’s too expensive then you don’t get any, and if you die, too fucking bad. Just so long as you don’t dip into their bank account.

Then they’ll tell you, all outraged-like, that life sucks today because people have gotten too selfish and only care about their own desires, not about the good of society. (For instance, this mentality is frequently on display when conservatives speak out against gay marriage.) Laws-a-mussy. Fo’ shame.

That’s the best they can do?

They don’t have every single little bit of data yet?

Somebody got a (relative) few bits of information wrong?

It might (gasp!) cost money to fix the problem?

Oh, and we don’t know this is all a scam, we’re just guessing?

Wow.

Tell me something, Groves… and all the rest of you, too. How the fuck is anyone supposed to trust us about what constitutes a proper human diet (adjusted for regional and cultural differences, of course) if it comes out you guys are wrong about this one?

I mean, if you don’t care and this is your idea of how to solve the overpopulation problem… well, knock yourselves out, I guess.

But if you actually do care about people, and are horrified at my suggestion… well? What the hell am I supposed to think?

At minimum I don’t understand why the implication always is that we don’t have global warming so we can do whatever we want. That’s not working. Time to get back to the drawing board. At MINIMUM it makes no damn sense to burn up all our resources so there aren’t any for future generations. Surely you understand this concept; I hear people like you bitch all. the. time. about how Obama is Satan because he’s running up the deficit. You grasp the concept with money. It’s time to expand your intellectual reach to encompass other resources too.

Whether or not there’s global warming, we’re in a hell of a pickle. The sooner people like you get your heads out of your asses and start engaging in political discourse like you have a goddamn brain cell or two to rub together, the better off we all might be.

Just saying. Enjoy your steak. Which, by the way, I don’t believe it causes global warming either. But never mind.

postponed weigh-in

Dana Seilhan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:55:15 +0000

My child is becoming quite the photographer. Amazing what you can get with those kid-resistant* Fisher-Price digicams.

It even comes with a special-effect Ugly Momma distortion setting.

No, seriously, I realized after eating on Wednesday that I’d forgotten to weigh in. I meant to do it today, but forgot again. So I am just not going to bother for the week. Check back next week and I might have something for ya. Might. Dunno.

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*There is no such damn thing as kid-proof. No matter what Dr. Phil might think.

can’t blink, even for a second

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:47:42 +0000

The good part of my weekend... knitting these little dudes

I wrote this blog entry at my SparkPeople blog (link to my page is in the sidebar to your right):

I wonder when I am going to get it through my thick head that I can’t ever rest with this effort? There are no breaks. There is no laying down the baton and lounging under a tree for five minutes. There is no “gee I will get around to meal planning/cooking/cleaning the kitchen later.”

If I don’t stay on top of food planning and prep I will not get through this.

There’s another adult in the house, but he is the throw-it-together-and-see-what-sticks type of cook. I need to know what I’m eating for right now. I need to get the macronutrient ratios I’m aiming for, I need to see if I can get all my nutrition from my food and I need to make sure my carb count doesn’t go too high. (And I don’t have much wiggle room there. If I want my fat stores to continue to mobilize I *have* to stay below 100g and probably more like 30g to 40g. The years of soda and grains have taken their toll on me.)

He just about never cleans anything in the kitchen but he makes just as much mess as I do, and frequently more. That dishwasher could be *empty* and he wouldn’t put anything in it unless he was feeling magnanimous. On top of that he’s a much messier cook than I am, which just exacerbates the problem.

To be fair he works 8 hours a day. This here at home is my job. We’re not married, not even involved, but the economy is in the crapper, I don’t have that great of a job history, and this way we can both parent without the usual back-and-forth of split-up parents who are being reasonable about contact with their child. So we’re sort of in a “traditional” setup here–and that’s fine.

My grievance is that this is a much larger residence than I’m used to dealing with. There is more of EVERYTHING that I have to keep up with. He, however, has not seen a more than threefold increase in *his* work duties since we moved in together. So a little more help from him than I’m currently getting would be very welcome. Apparently, though, it is also too much to ask.

And me being mad about it isn’t going to help anything. Me getting depressed and giving up on cooking even for a few days isn’t doing me a favor. He’s not going to suddenly remember that it is helpful for him to clean up after himself, or that even taking his dishes from the living room to the kitchen after a meal (yes, we often eat in there–something else I want to change), would be helpful to me. He just doesn’t care. So I have to care.

And I can’t blink. I can’t stop. I can’t drop anything. Because otherwise I give up and order pizza.

OK, it was *one* pizza. But even one’s too much, if I don’t make the pizza here. Wheat crust vs. cauliflower/mozz crust… no contest, as far as what it does to me.

Back on track today… and I tell ya, I could feel a lot worse than I do. Not a total loss. Probably not a loss of *weight* either… but what can you do.

Not quit, that’s what I can do.

That was pretty much my weekend in a nutshell. I’m up early today, so it’s time to hit the kitchen. You don’t wanna know how bad it is.

Wednesday weigh-in: 242

Dana Seilhan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:11:01 +0000

248.5 | 242 | 140

Sorry for the blurry focus. It’s hard to tell in the LCD panel and I’m not gonna shoot it again.

Wow, I’m actually close to the 100-pound-overweight line now. Cool. This is still going way slow, but along with the not eating enough, I suspect I didn’t actually have that much water weight to lose the first week, in contrast with my previous experiences, so this is the actual fat loss now and I was way worse off than I had thought.

Or hell, I can come up with hypotheses all damn day. It gets boring. The number’s going down and as long as I’m healthy that’s all I really care about.

A paradoxical problem

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:22:31 +0000

I suspect the scale’s gonna show very little progress tomorrow. I’m aggravated. In the past, I’ve dumped water weight pretty fast and then kept on losing. Now it’s maybe a pound a week. It’s not That Time Of The Month–I just had that, and my cycle seems to have settled in at around 32 days or so, after years of being highly irregular. (Ah, the wonders of retinol.)

The only diet change I’ve deliberately adopted for the specific purpose of weight loss is low-carbing. I remember using Slim-Fast shakes when I was married, back in the mid-90s, but I can’t say I was following a program per se. (And DAMN I would love to be at that weight again, even if it was still forty to fifty pounds over “normal.”) This is it, and I’ve tried LCing a few times, quitting each time. Conventional wisdom says if you keep yo-yoing like that, your body holds on to the weight more stubbornly with subsequent weight-loss attempts.

Well, conventional wisdom also says you have to starve and run yourself to death to lose weight, and we know what bullshit that is. Or, at least, I do. So I’m not exactly convinced.

My hypothesis is that I’m simply not eating enough. What a bizarre problem to have on a weight-loss program, right? We’re supposed to eat less, not more, right? Well, other than drinking liquid calories, one hallmark of my life as an obese person is I haven’t been much of an eater. I’d go most of the day with next to nothing and then eat a big dinner, and still (by my estimate) not get 2000 calories a day unless it was in the soda. And there’s no nutrition in soda. Just sugar*.

I’m not much better about it now, especially in the past couple of weeks. When I first start LCing I’m going like gangbusters, trying to get at least two squares a day and recording everything I eat. After a while I get bored and go back to my bad habits. I know intermittent fasting is supposed to be healthy, but a part of IF is eating that huge meal during your permitted eating time. Even Muslims who observe Ramadan go gangbusters on the iftar meal at sunset. I don’t do that. I just grab a regular-sized meal and as soon as my body isn’t going “HelLO I need FOOD here” anymore, I quit eating.

The end result is that on days I bother tracking, I’m lucky to break 2000, and most days it’s more like the 1500-1800 calorie range, and more like 1200 if I’m feeling particularly unambitious.

It’s not like it makes a difference. I’m still in ketosis, which means my body is still getting calories even if I am not eating them. (Realizing that made me understand just how stupid conventional calorie theory is. It never takes calories from burned fat into account, among other flaws.) Eating 1500 calories a day doesn’t mean I’m only getting 1500 calories a day. It just means I’m only counting 1500 calories a day. What calories my body might be getting from fatty acids and ketones is anyone’s guess.

But as I’m skipping grain foods for the most part, the foods I get are nutritionally dense. Calorie-burning is all well and good but if I’m not eating enough of the nutritionally dense stuff, that means I’m not getting the nutrients in that food. Calories are not nutrients, after all. Vitamins and minerals, on the other hand, are.

I drink an Emergen-C packet in a glass of water most days to satisfy my desire for sweet drinks. But that only covers some water-solubles for the most part. (Since I started doing this I no longer crave sushi; Emergen-C has 500% of the daily requirement for vitamin B6, of which salmon is an important source. Guess which raw fish is my favorite?) I need the whole gamut, not just a few vitamins, and there are undoubtedly other nutritional factors in whole food that science hasn’t isolated or understood yet. If I don’t eat the food I don’t get those either.

So I have a sneaking suspicion I might know what’s going on here. I think my weight loss will go much better if I eat more regularly, and eat enough. The trick is getting to that point. My lazy eating habits have been going on for most of my life. That’s a lot of inertia to work against. It remains to be seen whether I’m up to the task.

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*I appreciate that the source of sugar has some importance, but if you look at the actual proportions of fructose to glucose in both high-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar (beet sugar is something else again and can potentially come from GMO sources, as HFCS also can), they’re virtually the same. Anyone who tells you sugar is “healthier” for you than corn syrup is fucking lazy and hasn’t bothered to do what little research is needed to know otherwise.

Saturday Snark, Sunday edition

Dana Seilhan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 03:59:59 +0000

I have skipped this probably two weeks in a row and I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of it that although I’m writing this at 13 minutes past midnight, let’s pretend I’m actually writing it on Sunday, so I’m totally lying with the datestamp. Yes, I’m that OCD. Fuck it. Let’s roll.

I was going to take a photo of a lacto-paleo cheesecake I made “tonight” in honor of my child’s sperm donor’s recent birthday, but he cut into it before I could yell HangOnASecLemmeGetTheFuckinCamera. So you get kitties again instead, because I like pictures to go with my LinkWithin plugin. This is my cat Lundi getting mommy hugs. She likes to get up on the bathroom sink and then prop her paws on my chest and purr like crazy while I pet her.

OK, there’s the cute part, on with the bitching.

—–

First up tonight, I had been looking for some info about the Paul Campos book The Obesity Myth, which I checked out of the library some time ago. He had shared a story about a little girl who’d been diagnosed with obesity at the age of three, and I was looking up particulars, including her name. I know her first name is AnneMarie or Anne-Marie or Ann-Marie or some variation thereof and that was the best I could do. Anyway, in the process, I ran across this interview with him from last year.

Paul, Paul, Paul. I fucking hate you. Do you want to know why I fucking hate you? Because you drive me certifiable. You really do.

First off, there’s so much you say about obesity that just makes too much damn sense. I totally agree with you that a large component of the obesity debate is moral in nature. People really do believe fatties get fat on purpose. (I am a fattie, in case you’re late to the party, so I am using the term ironically.) And boy do they hate us for it. I want to call up all sorts of metaphors to illustrate this, like clubbing baby seals and hijacking Santa’s sleigh and canceling Halloween but I just can’t get up that level of snark-fu this fine evening. I’m kind of in a hurry. Anyway. They hate us. Just because we’re fat. I think that’s fucking stupid, and I applaud Campos for pointing up its absurdity.

I also think he may be onto something when he says there’s more difference in health status between men and women, and the young and the old, than there is between overweight people and slender people. Of course, he’s probably counting everyone who’s the least little dab over the upper limit for normal BMI, so the argument isn’t entirely honest. And I don’t know where to begin to follow up all these grand sweeping declarations of his about how actually harmless obesity is and therefore we should all stop worrying about it unless the fattie in question is so huge they have to move him or her with a tow truck. So I’ll leave it alone for now and simply applaud him for saying that there are much more serious health problems to worry about than how much energy we’re storing.

That said, as I stated up there somewhere, I have read The Obesity Myth. And unlike the legions of fattiebloggers who scanned, like, the first chapter and went “OMFG see it’s NOT our faults we’re fat and it’s NOT gonna kill us and this guy is AWESOME!!!1!!!one!!!”, I read large portions of it, if not the whole thing. I have this bad habit of skipping around in books and reading them in non-chronological chunks, so I can’t say for sure, but I got quite a bit of territory covered.

And… This guy is a whackjob. A few examples of said whackjobbery:

1. He claims feminists, particularly NOW and their ilk, have never cared about body image issues. More accurately, he wonders why they are so mysteriously silent on the issue. Typical fucking man, you could get in his face and scream at him that his skid-mark-encrusted underwear is all over the floor again for the third time this week and he’d push you out of the way ’cause you’re blocking his football game, then five minutes from now dig through his dresser and wonder aloud why he has no clean shorts. They don’t listen. Ever. I’m sick of it.

2. Actually, he seems to have quite the hard-on for knocking feminists, because next he blames them for the destruction of marriage, which means women spend a lot more time on the meat market, which means we can’t afford to let ourselves go. Unlike, of course, say, Italian women who sit at home cheerfully packing on the pudge while their hubbies go around boinking every nubile young teenager in the village. He seriously uses this as an example of proper womanhood, y’all. I’m not making this up. Because feminists suggest we don’t have to put up with this shit, it’s their fault we can’t be fatties anymore.

3. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere that I read in his book did Campos even come close to addressing the fact that obesity is often a symptom of chronic disease even if it is not the cause. I actually agree with him that it’s likely to not be a cause of illness. Cool with me. I’m hip, dude. But somehow he cannot wrap his brain around the idea that maybe if I suddenly gain fifty pounds in a year connected with childbearing even though I am exclusively breastfeeding, maybe that means there is something wrong. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, for example, frequently occurs in postpartum women–and it causes weight gain, and thyroid dysfunction is nothing to fuck around with. If Campos had his way, millions more hypothyroid women would go undiagnosed, ’cause being fat ain’t nuttin’ but a thang.

Idiot. Naturally, because being so chunky you can’t tie your own shoes or walk faster than fifty yards an hour is just a normal genetic variation and can’t be avoided, the fat acceptance crowd embraces him wholeheartedly and even says he’s a good feminist. Yeah. Because ignoring and dismissing entire fields of feminist work is totally a feminist thing to do.

One of many reasons I avoid the fat-acceptance movement like the fucking plague it is even as I acknowledge the importance of (1) treating fatties as human beings and (2) not making fatness into any more of a moral issue than a runny nose or a bad rash.

And Paul? Do me a favor? Quit sacrificing fat women on the altar of your lack of marital success. I’m pretty sure you’ve been dumped on your ass by a feminist woman at least once in your life. You don’t come out and say so, but it’s not difficult to read between the lines. If I want your help, I’ll tell you how to give it. Til then, pick something else to write about. No love, Me.

—–

Second up tonight is something I have been meaning to bitch about for a few weeks now. It isn’t a major thing, just another symptom of the ridiculous lengths people will go to in order to make fatties out to be subhuman and dysfunctional.

New Theory: Messy Apartments Can Lead To Obesity

I think there should be a law against using the word theory unless you’re going to use it correctly. Creationists use it to discredit evolution, the implication being that “theory” means “guess.” The same usage is going on here. If you’re accustomed to reading headlines about the latest research studies in some field or another, you might be misled into thinking there’s some new study out about a link between messiness and fatness.

You would be wrong.

The article quotes a Glamour writer and no, she’s not aware of any studies either. She hasn’t even talked to anyone else about this subject matter. It’s just something she came up with one day and wants to put out to a wider audience.

If you look at her story as she tells it, though, all you can really discern is that she gained eleven pounds and let her apartment go to shit at the same time. She seems to think the messy apartment led to the weight gain. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that the weight gain led to the apartment getting messy. Why in the world would it do that? Aren’t I blaming a mess on fatness anyway? No, not really. Just as I think obesity is a symptom of diseases like diabetes (type 2, anyway), I also think weight gain can be a sign of depression–and who the fuck cleans house when they’re depressed? Mutants, maybe, but for most of us, housekeeping is the LAST thing on our minds.

But let us not pass up an opportunity to diss the fatties. Why, that wouldn’t be any fun.

‘K, got to go. By the way, if y’all see any snark-worthy material out there on the internets, I’d love to have it. I find plenty on my own, but I’m sure I miss a lot of stuff. Later.

Wednesday weigh-in: 243

Dana Seilhan — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:15:05 +0000

248.5 | 243 | 140

I am fresh outta double-A batteries and my camera’s starving so you get kitty yoga instead.

Actually, thanks to the aforementioned camera issues (my cat Tabby up there is a pic from about a week or so ago), I wound up weighing three times. The first time I got 243.5, the second time with camera in hand at start of weighing it was 244 (who knew that little fucker weighed half a pound?), and the third time with nothing in hand, but wearing the same undies and socks as when I started, I got 243. I need all the encouragement I can get, so I’m taking the smallest number.

Plainly I don’t have half the carb tolerance I think I do. It’s back to strict for me; I’ll just have to figure out how this works in practice, and record my food intake more thoroughly, no matter how much I fucking hate doing it.

Sigh.