Previous post on weight & health: NPR’s This American Life: “Tell Me I’m Fat”
Well, since I published this post saying I’d better accept my fatness or live in the delusion of future thinness, I’ve chosen the latter. I was a skinny kid and stayed thin for most of my adult life, so I simply refuse to accept permanently the weight I put on as my marriage fell apart in 2012 and 2013.
Besides altering diet and adding more exercise, I’ve been seeing a nutrition response testing professional. She adjusted my nutrition, diet and exercise, and told me I’d start losing weight in a few months of working with her. In eight months her treatment has done wonders for improving my energy, mood, digestion and sleep, but I haven’t lost any weight. Apparently I’m the very first of this practitioner’s clients to not lose weight simply with her nutritional help. Great. In spite of my overhauled diet and exercise, my fat has refused to budge.
Extra weight often has an emotional component that can be complicated by food addiction, so I’ve also been working on my emotional reasons for holding on to these pounds. With Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) I’ve tapped and tapped and tapped on my sugar addiction and slowly the layers (a word that always makes me think of cake) of my fear have peeled away. Two weeks ago I had yet another session with EFT/hypnotherapist practictioner Lili Betancourt, who has helped me a lot over the years. We tapped on sweets, marriage failure, weight, sugar and coffee. The session went very well, but the weight didn’t change. Meditation has also been part of my healthy habits. Meditation has been shown to help with addictive behavior, including food issues, but it hasn’t been the key for me, either.
What the hell? So this month I added an acupuncturist. I’ve had lots of acupuncture done in my life, but Brent Garcia says he specializes in problems with which you’ve tried everything and are about to give up. That’s me! On my first visit he identified my weight problem as being related to weak spleen energy and told me to eat 8-10 cups of vegetables a day. That’s a lot!
Fortunately the nutrition response testing (NRT) professional has me on wheat grass juice and green essence pills, so she says I can make it four cups of vegetables a day. Whew!
Fortunately the nutrition response testing (NRT) professional has me on wheat grass juice and green essence pills, so she says I can make it four cups of vegetables a day. Whew!
So for the past week I’ve been doing that, but I also found that in the days following my session with Lili, I had less interest in coffee. Weird. In fact on a couple of days I forgot to finish it and had to come back to my one, small cup of coffee later in the day. Then on Wednesday, the NRT practitioner suggested I go one week with no sugar at all, not even fruit, which meant cutting coffee because I can’t drink it without milk and sugar. And it didn’t elicit an emotional response from me at all. In fact, I’ve had no coffee since Wednesday and haven’t missed it. Very unexpected.
I saw the acupuncturist again two days ago. Brent said my spleen energy is better and he needled some major spleen points, so I feel really turbo-charged now. I also read up on spleen qi. According to traditional Chinese medicine, weak spleen energy occurs with too much cold and “dampness” which can cause weight to stay on no matter what you do. That sounds familiar! So I’m off chilled drinks and foods: good-bye yogurt, ice cream and ice in my water. Other things that weaken spleen qi are coffee, alcohol, fried foods, sugar, wheat and dairy. Yup, all the fun stuff. But that’s okay. I don’t think I need to eliminate all of it, and certainly not permanently. Just while I’m healing.Of course, my weight hasn’t budged a gram even though I’ve spent the past week replacing half my food with vegetables and keeping up the exercise, but I guess my spleen isn’t strong enough yet. At least I hope that’s it. I really hope the acupuncture does it. I knew there was more going on here than food, exercise, sugar addiction and emotions because I’ve really tapped those out. The acupuncture has to be the final piece of the puzzle. Damn it, I’m determined to lose this marriage-going-down-the-drain pudge!
Previous post on weight & health: Obesity crisis is mental health crisis
Previous post on weight & health: Obesity crisis is mental health crisis
Thank you, Anonymous. That actually makes me feel better right now. I'm working with a couple of professionals on this and they say my uterine fibroid (which an ultrasound confirmed is still there) is the cause of my hormonal problems which contribute to my inability to lose weight. I imagine many people enter middle age with problems that have building up for years, and then those problems cause things like joint pain, weight gain, eye problems, brain fog and everything else we associate with getting old. I suspect it's not age that makes us get worse. It's problems we, as a society, don't recognize early enough to head off the symptoms. But you're right: there's only so much I can do. I should take it easy on myself (story of my life).
When I was a young child, I would visit my grandmother who lived by the beach in a lower-middle class community with an extremely high percentage of elderly people. Back then (before statins and routine colonoscopies), the women outnumbered the men by about 10 to 1. Almost none of the women were very athletic-looking or particularly fit, though they were definitely ambulatory and some were slender. Others (like my grandmother) were rotund. Their "chests" were rather small and they carried a lot of weight (proportionately) between their rib-cages and their knees. Many of these women were in their 70s, 80s and even 90s. Bodies change as we age. I have no doubt that we can manage these changes to some extent with diet and exercise, but there is a limit.
Thanks, Michael. I think the "panacea" will turn out to be a complicated combination of things that's specific to each individual. Apparently a lot of people can achieve weight loss by simply adjusting diet, exercise and nutrition (like with Claire). Others need to do that, plus address emotional issues. And for me, weight loss seems to require all that PLUS some other component(s) that I'm still figuring out. Extremely frustrating!
I demand to know the ever elusive panacea to this epidemic if you find and care to share it. Heck, I'll even throw in flowers and a meal.