Life in Skinny Drag

I've made major changes in the foods I consume and the way I move through and in the world. I'm making and consuming even more fermented foods, especially homemade kefir, beet kvass, and fermented carrots and ginger. I eat a lot of protein (about 180g daily), especially red meat, whey isolate, and egg whites. I take supplements like magnesium, niacin, vitamins C and D, SAM-e, and glutamine. I'm lifting moderately heavy weights 3-4 times a week at my gym, and walking about 75 minutes or more three times a week. 

The results are significant: my body fat has come down with a major increase in muscle mass; my strength, flexibility, and stamina are better than they've ever been in my life. My mood is generally quite good, and the depression and anxiety have eased greatly. 
I'm also much smaller (even though my weight hasn't shifted significantly in the last year) --I used to wear size 18WP pants that translates as "short wide woman"); now I wear misses' 12 or 10.
I often feel as if I'm passing--kind of like I'm a fat person in a skinny suit. I'm the same me, but my presentation triggers different responses. It is curious how my physical changes  affect those around me. Now that I'm smaller, I see quite clearly (and regularly) how fat and big people are discriminated against--because shop clerks and other service people treat me so very well.

They eagerly come to me in stores, I no longer have to chase them down; I now get shown to much better seats in restaurants. This is true even in places I've gone into for years--which makes the treatment even more distressing.( Sometimes I want to scream out, "Funny, you never treated me this nice when I was big!" but I don't.)
The most difficult responses are from people I've known for quite a while.They take a lot of different forms--snide comments from a friend who has suddenly become hyper-critical of my body the smaller it gets--and will report with unfettered glee if she thinks I've gained weight. Or when someone begins to come on to you after you've gotten smaller--that's just creepy. Sometimes I think it's shame--a friend who carries a lot of extra fat used to take pictures of us each time she came to visit, and then share them with me. The last couple of times she took the pictures, but "keeps forgetting" to send me copies.

 (This Clusie L. YouTube video--"Why People Don't Want You to Lose Weight"--addresses some of this. Definitely worth a watch.) 

Or another who has been doing aerobic activity for years, frequently complains of being in poor health, and despairs often about losing weight (that is, losing fat). She's seen me make these changes (and the results), we've talked a little bit about it--and she continues to do her aerobic activity and complain. I don't think there's only one true path to health, but I've stopped counting the number of people who tell me they want to get healthier, compliment me on my health--and yet keep doing what they've always been doing. "The eye doesn't see what flies into it," is a West African proverb that seems particularly apt.
I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. That's what I know.

The Healthy Hypocrite Ponders Meat

What do you do when your ethics and values conflict with your health needs? I began this blog four years ago to chronicle my transition to raw veganism. My goal and heartfelt desire was to eat in a way that supported my health yet caused as little environmental harm as possible.
After much experimentation, I now know that(today) my physical and mental health seem  best when I eat a lot of protein, particularly red meat. That is not who I want to be. It is, however, who I am now.

Raising beef--particularly cheap beef--has a massive environmental footprint. In the first year, as I ate my tofu, cheese, yogurt, almond butter, eggs, beans, quinoa, rice, and spinach, I'd look with smug disdain at people chomping on fast-food burgers, knowing that their meat was wreaking environmental havoc and decimating rain forests--and that I had made the more superior choice. 
As my stomach rebelled against grains, dairy, eggs, nuts, and soy, and my protein needs increased (because of the benefits of protein for folks with attention issues, along with strength-training and wanting to increase muscle mass), I began eating meat. I was, at the time, eating chicken, grass-fed beef and lamb, and line-caught salmon, so I could still put a big distance between my meat- and fish-eating and those of the environment-wrecking masses. 
Well, that line of demarcation has crumbled: my pocketbook can no longer afford my ethics (and my stomach stopped liking egg yolks and chicken). I go to Trader Joe's now and buy a pound of ground beef, wrapped in plastic, for about six bucks. The label tells me it contains meat from Brazil, Australia, and the U.S. It is certainly not grass-fed. The cheap lamb I

buy comes from Australia or Iceland, and is still cheaper (dollar-wise, but not on the environment) than lamb grown less than a few hundred miles from my apartment. I don't buy salmon much any more, but do buy sole and cans of tuna, even as I know the oceans are over fished. 
When you eat about 130 grams of protein a day, you can't (or at least, I can't) do it all on meat (as there's only about 7 grams of protein in each ounce). I do consume powdered egg whites and whey powder in protein shakes. 
Unfortunately, my stomach doesn't do well with dairy, fermented or otherwise. Although I consume whey isolate (with the least amount of lactose of the wheys) my stomach still has difficulty with it, and sometimes rebels against egg whites, too.  So I can't rely on either one for my primary source of protein. And that leads me back--to meat. 
Also, as I have handled more meat--and more meat that looks like meat (for example, lamb chops or shanks that resemble *my* body parts) I'm quite more aware that I'm eating another being, a dead being killed so I could eat it. I do give thanks to the animal, and have done that for a long time, but even that seems insufficient lately.
So the more meat I eat, the more I feel like a hypocrite--albeit a healthy one. I'm not sure what to do.

Embracing the Ugly Meat

For most of my life I've preferred to eat meat that looked as little like meat as possible: nothing resembling a body part or organ, no visible blood or fat, and no large blood vessels, hanging skin, or connective tissue. To me, meat with any of these elements was ugly and undesirable meat.

Moreover, I didn’t like meat to have much of a taste, or flavor. Any that did I called, “too rich” or gamy. When given a choice, I consistently and insistently requested the “breast” or “white” meat.

Moreover, from an early age I looked down on those who chose the ugly meat. I remember being silent and disgusted as my mother ate chicken hearts, livers, and butts (which we called “the parson’s nose”), or gnawed on and split small bones between her teeth, then sucked out the marrow. I would swear to myself that I would never eat such things when I grew up. And I didn’t.

For decades, I preferred not to handle, or even smell, raw meat I was a vegetarian for many years, telling others and myself that eating formerly living, sentient beings was abhorrent. I now know I didn’t eat meat for years because of my dislike of meat in the raw. 

The Now

Today I eat lots of meat, often three or more times a day. I would prefer not to eat meat. I've tried plant-based protein (including tofu and other soy products; nuts; and grains such as quinoa), and they don’t "work" for me nearly as well as meat. That is the fact: I would prefer that it not be.

After making my food changes in July, I eat mostly meat and leafy vegetables, and spend a lot of time thinking about, handling, and cooking raw meat. As I've written about before, I give thanks at each meal to all the beings that contribute to my health, especially the animals killed so I could eat parts of them.

For months, eating meat has meant reducing mounds of generic “ground beef" into stacks of patties. In addition to being easily measurable, ground beef frees me from contemplating what part of a cow provided a particular mass of raw flesh.

That’s all changed in the last few months. I’ve adopted a couple of elements of the gut and psychology syndrome (GAPS) food plan, especially the use of sauerkraut as a probiotic, and eating meat I’d formerly rejected.

The GAPers believe that “[t]he gelatinous soft tissues around the bones and the bone marrow provide some of the best healing remedies for the gut lining.” That means marrow, connective tissue, and rings of fat. Hamburger patties just don't cut it—cue the ugly meat.

The other day I bought two chunks of cow leg, known in the trade as center-cut shanks). When I opened the brown-paper wrapped package, I saw what a three-inch section of my own leg would look like (without the skin). There was no way of avoiding my kinship with that cow.

A slice of your leg would look like this, too.

Cooking ugly meat is different from cooking its cuter cousins. With ground beef, fish fillets, or chicken breasts, the cook just warms up the toaster oven, pops ‘em in, and waits about 10 or 12 minutes for them to cook.
Ugly meat takes time, and several steps. Take the shanks. Because leg muscles are well used, the meat will be tough unless cooked for a long time in liquid at a low heat (known as braising).

I first browned the shanks (in bacon grease), took them out of the pan, and put them on a plate. Then I browned sliced shallots, garlic, and shitake mushrooms in the same pan, along with some beef broth, apple cider vinegar, and spices. I then transferred everything to a covered Dutch oven, and cooked the contents in the over for 2 hours at 325 degrees.

After years of avoiding ugly meat, I was in for quite the taste shock when I ate the shanks. After not eating “dark” meat for decades, the full-bodied, over-rich, and gamy taste of the first bites of center-cut shank gagged me. I’m used to it now, but it was definitely an acquired taste.

Just now, I ate one shank with some steamed bok choy and snow peas. I’m taking this excursion into the World of Ugly Meats quite slowly. I’ve made shanks a few times, and baked barbecued pork ribs. Don’t expect posts about braised trotters, brains, or cow tongue anytime soon.

Back from the Dead. Now What?

 I was laid low this week with a bum stomach--projectile explosions from both ends, spine-cracking cramps, and chills, chills, chills. I first thought it was stomach flu, but now believe it was a bout of E. coli from meat left out of the cooler.

Not surprisingly, my food changed, and in a big way. I had no appetite, and consumed small portions of ginger ale, bananas, blueberries, and ginger chews, and rice cakes. I've also been swilling mushroom (and some chicken) broth. It felt as if the illness stripped my entire intestinal flora from my body, and that I wasn’t digesting even small amounts of these bland foods.

As it was happening, I saw this experience as a problem, a big one, until I saw an email from a woman in my Women & Food Group. Jill recently came down with bronchial pneumonia. Lily wrote her an email and commented, “The body has some interesting ways of cleansing itself.”

My thinking about the vomiting et al shifted after reading this. Thinking of the significant discomfort and unpleasantness as a kind of re-set of my gastro-intestinal system—and my eating—now feels like a more accurate and helpful way of viewing this experience. And, once again, I get to experiment with eating differently, finding out what my body needs in this time.

“So,” thought I, “What would I do if I had a clean slate—er, stomach?” I would introduce new flora in my digestive tract. Kefir (a fermented milk drink) has lots of probiotics, so I went out got some raw goat milk kefir, and some sauerkraut, which also contains them. For the last couple of days I’ve been eating sauerkraut first and last thing in the day, and a couple of times throughout the day.

I’m not feeling like eating meat right now, which is significant. I was eating large volumes of protein to help with my attention deficit disorder, and have noticed the lack has affected my focus, concentration, and memory.

However, I’m a bit afraid of it, too, and not up to digesting it right now. I also was increasingly conflicted about my growing embrace of Buddhism—a key tenet of which is not killing or causing harm to other beings—and chomping on meat. (Then again, the Dali Lama eats meat, supposedly because his doctor told him he needed to do so, and other Buddhists do eat meat.)

Right now, my body is hungry for vegetables and mushroom broth. My mouth, however, wants fat and sugar. I need to eat protein. What to do? Satisfy the body’s hunger and needs, and not the mouth’s.

The New Food, Now

My first meal today will be a bowl of mushroom broth with garlic, a teaspoon of miso, some spinach, and two servings of silken tofu. I’m also going to eat 3 boiled eggs (I’m shying away from fat, so scrambling them isn’t attractive right now). That will give me about 30 grams of protein, versus the 42 I’d get from the eggs with a 4 oz beef patty. That protein hit was extremely valuable, so I am concerned about the shortfall. (I may add a small portion of beans and a corn tortilla to boost the protein load.) I may have the same meal for dinner (without the beans and tortilla).

I am again trying to stay away from sugar, including fruit, and other carbs. A key reason is that I now have a yeast infection, both from the die-off of the healthy flora and the swilling of ginger ale and other sugars. Unfortunately, I have been craving sugar. Some of that is Candida-driven. It also happens when I don’t get enough protein. 

I have a lot of gratitude around this process: gratitude for my spirit of inquiry, for my willingness, for food to eat, and food options.

What's Going Well

I think I've been a bit unbalanced in my self-reporting.
Several people (including strangers!) said I'm excessively self-critical. I admit I do have tendencies in that direction.
So this post reviews some of the benefits I've received from the changes in my food, myself, and the process of change.
I am much more conscious of the food I eat.  Tracking my food, observing how my body responds to the food I do eat (and, in some cases, when I eat it) has provided me many pluses. For example, I:

• Recognize much more quickly when I am eating for avoidance/to numb out versus easing hunger.
• Eat smaller quantities of food than before.
• (Usually know) when I am hungry and what it is I need to eat.
• Generally eat a lot less compulsively and inattentively than before.

I am feeling physically better than I have in quite a long time. Until I made major changes to my food (I'm referring here to letting go of dairy, grains, most sugar, peanuts, and most roasted nuts) I had no idea how many of the limitations I'd grown used to were related to food. Since then, I'm:

• Much more flexible. For example, I no longer lean on something while I bend down to put the cat dish on the floor, and no longer need to do a 3-point, 2-position maneuver to stand up after sitting on the floor.
• A whole lot less bloated.
• Digesting my food more completely.
• Feeling a lot less congested in my body.
• Haven't gotten sick, and heal much more quickly from cuts and scratches (from my cats).
• Carrying around a much smaller belly.
• Much more conscious and happy with my physical self.
• Feeling sexy and attractive in ways I've not in quite a while.
• Feeling a lot less self-conscious (which is a great match with the previous bullet point, yes?).

Boosting my protein intake in the first half of the day has really helped my memory, recall, attention span, stamina, and work output,, while reducing brain fog. Who knew?
I now eat around 100 grams of protein daily, always in the first two meals of the day. When I don't, I see a clear drop off in my recall and memory first, and then the attention span gets shot to hell (it's still a challenge, but gets even worse without sufficient protein).

My experimentation and spirit of inquiry has made it possible for me to now judge much less harshly my process, weight, and myself.  A speaker at a 12-step meeting I attended recently used a phrase that has stuck with me. "I was locked and loaded," he said, "on a fixed idea."
That was me--with my food, my concept of what I needed to do, and how I was going to do it. My original goal was to go nearly or completely all-raw, with my protein from nut and other plant sources (e.g., soy). I was not going to eat sugar, and I certainly saw no need (and had zero desire) to track, much less measure, my food. And I certainly was not going to weigh myself for at least 90 days. In fact, for months I didn't care to admit that weight had anything to do with why I was making changes.
Now I'm hammering 3 eggs and 2 pieces of meat daily. I don't eat soy. I'm testing  to see whether or not I can have some sugars (e.g., agave, honey, and cane sugar). I (generally) measure and write down the food I eat (I'm now writing it down before I eat it, to see how that affects the volume of food I eat). I weigh myself weekly, and write that down, too.
There is a wonderful ease and acceptance I've gained. I put on 1.5 pounds last week (and a pound the week before that), yet I'm not freaked out, I'm not muscling myself; I'm breathing and being with ease.  I realize I haven't been eating nearly the amount of vegetables I was last month, so I've eaten more this week. I'll weigh myself next Tuesday, and perhaps make adjustments. I might, for example, see what happens if I reduce the amount of coffee (and the coconut milk I put in it), or not eat any sweeteners.
My point is:  I'm not acting out of shame or fear (nearly as much); I'm much less reactive, too. What freedom.

Bad Mix: New Foods + Eating, But Old Ways of Shopping

I've lived alone most of my life, yet always kept large quantities of food in the house.
I was afraid (nearly terrified) of running out of food, not having enough. I'd feel unsettled, ill-at-ease, if I didn't see food nearly spilling out of my fridge whenever I looked inside. Many times a day I'd open the door, stand there, and just look at the food. It would make me feel safer somehow, better. (I never identified the amount of food required to make the discomfort leave; the fear was such that I never probed.)
 Carb Queen

In the old days (3 months ago), I'd have to have lots of carbohydrates around: say, 2 lbs of steel cut oats, at least a pound of brown rice, rice noodles, a loaf or two of bread. And I'd need fat-laden, creamy stuff: a couple of packages of frozen mac & cheese from Trader Joe's, at least one package of cheese, and sometimes ice cream or chocolate mousse. I also required other sweets: I always had a pound of brown sugar, a couple of bars of dark chocolate, sometimes cookies in my home. Oh, and at least 3-5 frozen TV dinners.
Me and Scarlett O'Hara
My last partner complained that our freezer didn't work well because I'd overstuffed it with food. Sometimes she'd tease me. "Oh look," she'd say, feigning alarm, "we've only got 4 quarts of soy milk! What are we gonna do?!? What are we gonna do?!?" I'd chuckle, but with little enthusiasm. I knew she didn't know.
What she didn't know, of course, was hunger, the exhausting, regular, relentless hunger I knew growing up. She'd neverhad to choose between stealing food or going hungry, been fed margarine sandwiches for days on end, or nothing at all. I never revealed this to anyone; I was so ashamed of how poor we were.

My older sister and I talked about food all the time: what we'd eat if we could eat anything we wanted; how and where we'd shop, what we'd eat,how we'd cook it, the foods we'd always keep at the ready in our adult homes. For her: overflowing plates of crisply-fried shrimp, and lots of bacon. For me: just big piles of rice, gravy, and meat, followed by cake and ice cream.
I didn't know at the time, but I was like Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara, shaking her bony white fist at the sky while declaring: "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again." My fist was dark brown and bony, and I would have been chattel in her sanitized Confederacy, but we were sisters in desperation, in hunger.
 Now Different, Now Challenging
And now I'm in the world with a new way of living and eating.  I consume mostly vegetables and protein (these days beef, nuts, and eggs), blueberries and mulberries. And am trying to shop without fear.
I've made progress: I've been able to reduce the amount of food I buy, and spend a lot less time seeking comfort from looking at the contents of my fridge and cabinet. However, my missteps are expensive. I'm still buying too much food (especially veggies), and even my Evert-Fresh Green Bags can't keep them fresh forever.
Living without the familiar bulging fridge is still a fear trigger for me. Tonight I was cleaning up a spill in the fridge, and noticed I didn't have much food in it.( I have more than enough, but nowhere near the previous volume).
I had a momentary squeeze of anxiety. "Where's my food," I thought. "Where's all my food?"