Weighty Issues

My mind likes to come out and play in the tender hours of the night, just as the light has gone out and Attie and Charles start snoring. My eyes close, and then like a college dormitory after lights-out, the doors of my mind all creep open and all kinds of thoughts flutter about . Some are good, some are not so good, often there are puzzles to be figured out and - my favorite - art projects come zooming into 3-D and I start designing things in my head. Love that part...

But, tonight, the door to my Repressed Issues came swinging open and out danced my chubby hips, and "fluffy" buttocks...my adipose tissues are haunting me.

There's a reason for this - this evening, I started reading "Ultrametabolism," a diet book by Dr. Mark Hyman. Those of you who know me well know I DETEST diets. I've been on a number of them, and they've done me no good. They've even added weight. I don't like to talk about them, I don't like to be in conversations about them, I don't like being around people who are obsessing about them - diets piss me off.

Get me around a bunch of women discussing their weight and I develop a need to pull the table cloth off, wrap it around myself, climb up on the table and begin lecturing all of my newly-created stunned audience that they're SO MUCH MORE THAN THEIR WEIGHT, that the size of their asses and their tummies SAY NOTHING about their worth as a human being. SO THERE.

But my dirty not-so-secret issue is - I'm overweight. And I hate it.

So, let's go back to the book. Why am I reading it? My nutritionist told me to. If Natalie the Wonder Nutritionist tells me to read something, I'll buy it and trust that she knows what she's doing.

Natalie Ledesma worked with my brother Chris, both as a peer and as his oncology nutritionist. Based at the University of California in Berkeley, Natalie works with Dr. Garret Smith, the oncologist my brother worked with as he fought his KS and as he wrote his book for trainers working with breast cancer survivors. (And for those of you who have managed to keep up with the timeline of Big Events in the Goad family, that's two years before I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I feel like my brother has been looking out for me!)

Natalie started working with me during my first diagnosis. Let's just say I'm not a model patient. I think she keeps me around because I'm "family" and we like each other a great deal. She's the stalwart type - even in the face of my too-frequent random indulgence in shrimp po'boys and philly cheese steak sandwiches, she sticks with me.

The last conversation we had came immediately after a call from my second opinion here in Houston. Dr. Naqvi let me know that she'd talked to my radiation oncologist and he insists that my cancer recurrence was within the field of the radiation treatments I received at the end of chemo last year. Theoretically, the recurrence shouldn't have existed. It should have either been killed by the chemo I received, or roasted by the radiation. Unfortunately, it was a resilient little schmutz, so the assumption is that I have a very aggressive form of breast cancer. If it is metastatic, I will know in the next year. It will show up somewhere.

Natalie called just after I got this delightful bit of news, and we had a frank discussion about how the docs are doing all they can for me - it's going to be up to me to make the lifestyle changes necessary to give me the best chance of surviving this crap.

Believe it or not - it's easier for me to get chemo then to make lifestyle changes.

That sounds awful. It's also unfortunately true.

I have never had a moment in my life where my weight was not an issue. I have memories of being a little girl, in first grade, and looking at my brownie pictures with some unremembered Important Person In My Life who made a comment about how fat I was. I was so ashamed. It only went downhill from there.

My world was the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The value of a woman was her looks. Oh - wait. Gee, what am I thinking?? That's the same thing for the 90s and into 2000. And it was true for decades before that. Wow. I guess women have been judged by the size of our keesters and our sex appeal for, like, ever....I'm a little bitter about that.

But I digress.

I have always been outsized. Taller than everyone, a little heavier, strong features. I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. My features are combined with pretty sensitive nature and a dysfunctional family that moved a lot, which meant that I was always the "strange" kid at school, which meant that I was pretty much tortured by other children at school. As you can imagine, this led to my always wondering what was wrong with me. I never thought to ask the question of what was right with me. Too many people were ready to tell me otherwise.

Combine this with a propensity to put on weight, and a family obsession with both food and being thin and what you get is yo-yo dieting, a constant feeling of being a failure and a perception that my body is out to get me. Certain family members' obsession with my weight led to all kinds of crazy behavior, all perpetrated with the idea that, if I were pushed enough, embarrassed enough, told how socially unacceptable I was, I would finally get off my lazy butt and lose weight.

Yes. I'm bitter about this. At the time this was going on, I had become so socially reclusive that I was eating my lunch in the library of the high school, translating Robin Hood stories from the Middle English in the Oxford Book of Ballads. I wouldn't talk to anyone anymore - I trusted no one. Lunch consisted of a my bagged sandwich, apple, three cookies and a snickers bar. I walked every day, worked with horses and rode, and took long hikes into the ranch behind our house. I liked to come home after school and watch the Muppet Show or the 3:00 movie. I sometimes did my homework in the pasture with my filly, Chantilly. I was not lazy, nor did I snack all the time. But my body still put on weight.

I dieted and ate differently from my family, munching on weighed portions while they had what they wanted. I lost weight and was elated; I'd put it back on again and hate myself. I'd watch as my food was measured out while everyone else's was just put on their plates. I endured comments from older family members about my shorts looking like I was a cased sausage. Visiting relatives seemed to always comment on my weight, whether I looked like I was heavier or whether I looked "good".

Needless to say, my issues with weight and identity were a pattern that went on for a long time. I started Weight Watchers before Charles and I were married and lost 50 pounds. Every 10 pounds I would find myself standing in front of the mirror, gazing at my newly lightened figure, and wonder at what I ever thought was wrong with myself at that weight because I was beautiful. How could I ever have hated myself at that weight? And then I'd lose another 10 pounds and, again, I'd gaze at the image and couldn't imagine what my problem was at that weight! At 30 pounds I was astounded - I loved what I saw and bought myself an antique dress, celebrating the beautiful woman I saw in the mirror. And on it went.

And then I lost my gall bladder. The low fat, supposedly doctor-created diet had exacerbated a pre-existing, inherited condition and out it came. And then the weight started coming back on. I found myself unconsciously staring at my figure as each decade of weight layered itself on my hips and stomach, and I unconsciously found myself standing at the mirror telling myself how much of a pig I was.

Finally, at the same 30 pound benchmark, I realized that I was the exact same weight that I was when I was so proud of myself and bought the dress. The only thing that had changed was my perception of myself at that weight, not the real beauty that was standing, weeping, in the mirror. I decided to try to quit beating myself up.

I made it a game - I realized that I was just as harsh in my mind to the women around me as I was to myself, so I challenged myself to find something beautiful about every woman I saw, and if I could, tell them about it. The results were astounding - I felt better about myself. (And I made a lot of women around me feel better about themselves as well.) I've dieted a few more times after that, but each time I do, I care less. There's a portion of me that see's a diet and does everything it possibly can to rip it to pieces and to never to submit to that kind of humiliation again.

This didn't stop me from crying myself to sleep the night before my wedding, sure that my dress wouldn't fit and that I would look like a pig in my wedding pictures. That all Charles would see when I walked down the aisle was a fat woman he'd been chained to. I worked through that. But, thanks to a variety of issues - hypothyroidism, a sedentary career, my hysterectomy, chemo, my denial that food is not necessarily friend - I'm the heaviest I've ever been, and it's looking like that extra weight could kill me.

There are those of you out there who are reading this and maybe don't understand what I'm talking about at all. Weight is an easy, black and white thing for you. Eat less, exercise more, weigh less. What's hard about that? But the equation is not complete - it's like simple math. You might get an nice, easy answer, a whole number, but once you get deeper into reality, you realize that whole numbers are only real when you're counting out apples, not when you're really trying to describe something of incredible importance. It's also similar to saying that poor people are poor because they spend too much and don't save. Nope. There are too many variables that are not being accounted for.

Being overweight is not symptomatic of a weak will. It's not a sign of laziness or lack of character. It is not a sign that someone is a success or a failure in life. Nor is being thin an indication of intellectual brilliance or a sterling character. Being fat or being thin is often a chemical accident of our genetics, just as surely as that of our skin color being black, brown, yellow or pink.

I know some of you will want to lecture me on this subject after reading this post. Please, do not give in to that temptation. I will be rude if you do. I'm working with a very talented, well trained, well studied nutritionist and she will be my source for all nutrition-related issues in my life. Say a prayer of patience for her - she'll likely need it. But she will be my only source for this. I want to hear from you if you understand what I've said here, I want to hear from you about your own issues with this, I want to hear that you love me and want me around - but don't even begin to lecture me or say "I told you so." I won't like that a'tall.

I know this is a no-fun post, especially before the holidays, but it's where I'm at right now, at 12:16 p.m. This is my spectre tonight and now that I've exercised it (pun intended) I'm off to bed.

Good night.