I've been watching this show Supersize
vs Superskinny pretty much all
night since I woke up at around 1am. I'm pretty nocturnal. But it
got me thinking about weight and my own body, especially since I've
put on quite a bit of weight recently, and I've had two family
members hospitalize for weight related injuries.
My
father is a classic overeater, and his poor diet eventually wore his
body so thin that his digestive tract just up and gave out on him,
with his colon bursting in two or three places. He underwent surgery
and is doing really well in recovery, but he will have to wear a colostomy bag for at least six months, and whatwith the ruptures, he
got a massive infection and has to have daily IV antibiotics and a
stint that goes directly into his heart. He is home, but will have
to go once a week to the hospital to get checked up and make sure
that he's progressing nicely. This is a major pain in the ass
because his surgeon is in the city, a 2 hour drive away from where he
lives.
My
grandma is on the other end of the scale. She's been suffering from
anorexia nervosa since the late 1950s-early 1960s and has worn her
body so thin that many of her organs are on their last leg. Her
bones aren't getting proper nutrition either, and break really
easily. She's been hospitalized twice recently, once for a hip
replacement, and again because her body went into ketosis, which is a
state where you aren't taking in enough food so your body starts
eating itself. In order to keep her brain alive, her body decided to
eat her muscle mass, and when it ran out of that, it started in on
her organs. So her own body ate her heart and kidneys.
I have no idea where I fall on the
scale of things. I'm currently heavier than I have been recently,
but not as heavy as I've ever been. At my heaviest I weighed 210lbs,
and at my lightest in my adult life I think I got down to 125 or
something. That was after a year-long weightloss journey, which I
began because my father had a heart attack due to his being
overweight, and I realized that my own weight had the potential to
cause major problems for me, medically.
According to http://www.calculator.net,
I need no more than 1370 to maintain my weight, and no more than 800
to lose weight (per day). 800 seems like... nothing. Guess I'd be
hard to starve. I'll gain a pound a week if I eat 1870. Also, my
current measurements put me at 34.9% body fat, which falls into the
obese category. It's supposed to be no more than 25%. My BMI is
30.86; which is obese, but barely. The obesity category starts at
30.
So. Yup. I'm fat. Which is weird,
because I don't really look fat. Or I guess it would be more accurate to say that I don't think I look fat. But that may be because I live in
the US where obesity is really common, and therefore I don't have a
good idea of what a body in the healthy weight range looks like.
When I look at myself, I wouldn't classify me, based on the visual,
as obese. Overweight, yes, but the idea that I would have 35% body
fat wouldn't enter my mind. I am not in tune with my body. When I
think of an overweight individual, in my culture, I think of someone
like my father; and if you compare my body to his, it doesn't look
like I'm in danger of any major health problems. But viewed in a
vacuum by medical professionals, I have real reason to be concerned.
So I've decided to track my eating habits, to see if I can pinpoint
my problem.
Being unemployed, like I am, makes it
very difficult to eat a healthy diet. That's why I've decided to
chronicle my food journal here, on-line. To see if it's possible to
eat a healthy, full diet while broke as shit. I live in the rural
United States, which may or may not be relevant, because I don't know
how we fare compared to other places, in terms of food prices, but I
do know that we don't have specialty or bulk stores, meaning that my
food choices here are MUCH more limited than when I lived in the
city, which had far more competition and selection. Here we've got
three grocery stores; Wal-mart, Save-a-Lot, and Food City. That's
it.
So without further ado, let's start the
food journal.
4/7/15
Measurements
Overbust: 41
Underbust: 33
Waist: 29
Hips: 49
1:00-5:00am: Coffee 582
5:00am: Cereal 280
Breakfast: 962 Already I'm over the
weightloss cals. But I've already spotted my first problem. I drink
¼ a cup of sugar in every glass of coffee. I say glass because I
don't drink my coffee out of a cup, like a normal person, but out of
a metal travel thermos, which easily holds 2-3 cups of coffee and I
consider one mug a serving. I'd love to switch to aspertaine or
something, but it's so expensive.
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