Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 24: Losing 60 Pounds by Being Imperfect

Hi, my name is Amber, and I am a douchebag elitist.

That's a harder admission for me to make than labeling myself a fat girl, as I did in the very first post of this blog series back in July of 2011.  It's easy for me to be unhappy about my weight - or at least it was when I actually felt that way - but it's harder for me to be unhappy about being great.  And by great I mean snotty.  It's easy to conflate those two things if you're self-applying labels.  I don't know what makes a person turn into an elitist, but I know for me it happened really early.  When we finally got internet service at my house when I was in high school (suddenly this sounds like a very old-person sort of thing to say), I spent a lot of time arguing on the internet and trying to be right about absolutely everything.  Which, for a 16-year-old, just isn't going to happen.  But I felt smarter than everyone around me and I thought that that justified whatever level of snobbery my giant head could support.

As I rapidly approach 30 years of age, my elitism is continually getting tempered by the real world.  It's like a rough stone pelted by lots of debris - eventually that stone will smooth out because of those impacts.  So, although it's not saying much, I can at least aver that I am not as bad as I used to be.  I still wrestle with the tendency, though, to be right about everything.  It's a high standard to set for one's self, being right all the time.  I'm sure that there are some people who combine egotism and elitism in such a way that it requires no self-reflection, but for me, I have to set the example of what I preach in whatever realm we happen to be dealing with.  Hypocrisy infuriates me, so I at least try to avoid being a hypocrite.

When I started my actually-successful fitness and fat loss trek (as opposed to all the failures of the past), I was relatively ignorant, as n00bs tend to be.  I had some first-hand experience with exercise and nutrition, but my science was weak, as was my practice.  By the time I learned enough to know what I was doing, it became clear that I still hardly knew anything.  I knew, however, that if I was going to make this work, we were talking about a complete lifestyle change.  Which is super fucking scary.

The exercise component was actually the easy part for me.  I enjoy exercise, which I know isn't true of a majority of people, but as many can tell you, all the exercise in the world isn't going to undo the damage of a preposterous diet.  You can't outrun chicken fingers and french fries, at least not for long.  There are lots of asterisks and subtleties to this principle, but the rule of thumb is that you have to expend more calories than you take in if you're trying to lose weight.  If you're eating around maintenance (that is, equal amounts in and out, so maintaining weight) then you could theoretically just add some exercise to your day and slowly lose weight.  But for most of us at the time when we decide to get our shit together, we're either gaining weight or maintaining a ridiculously unhealthy weight, so a walk around the block isn't going to do the job.

Knowing that I would have to alter my eating habits drastically gave me a lot of anxiety.  You see, I'm a picky eater.  I've talked about it here before, so I won't get into the whole rigamarole, but basically I don't eat a variety of foods, I don't try new foods, and I hate flavor.  At least unfamiliar flavor, which is almost everything.  I like my food boring, straightforward, predictable, and thoroughly play-tested.  If I started eliminating entire foods from my diet, I would run into serious problems.  But with such frequent players as french fries, Doritos, soda, and chocolate, well...how the fuck was that going to work?

I decided that I would simply follow the math of (calories out) - (calories in) = >0.  I switched from full calorie soda to a variety of acceptable diet sodas (currently Pepsi Next is well-stocked in my house), but other than that, I just worried about the math.  If I could "afford" to eat junk food, then fine.  If I couldn't, then I didn't.  My portions were measured and consistently small.  A food scale became absolutely essential to making this work.  Some days I went over my calories.  More than some, really.  But instead of thinking of every day as a final test of my will, I thought of every day as a practice run.  If I noticed that I was emotionally eating, or eating past satiety, or eating because of a social situation, I made a mental note of it and used that information to improve my habits.  I didn't go on guilt trips over eating a cookie or having an extra meatball with dinner.  I used my dropping weight to motivate myself to keep going, and used the stalls/plateaus either as pieces of data to improve my routines or simply just ignored them.

In this manner, I have lost 60 pounds.  I'm basically at maintenance weight, although I'm intending to lose another 5-10 pounds over the course of my marathon training (my bodyfat % is still higher than I'd like, so that's really where I'm focusing right now - the weight is really a non-issue at this point, which is nice to say).  It has been hard work.  I spend a lot of time and energy giving a shit.  It's really, really easy to be fat.  Not emotionally, of course, but with the day to day stuff?  Yeah, that's pretty fucking simple.  Eat, sit, sleep, repeat.  Now, I wear a FitBit to track my steps and activity throughout the day, weigh and measure all my food, log everything I eat and drink on MyFitnessPal, use GymPact to make sure I'm exercising enough times during the week, and log all of my exercise on Fitocracy.  It is a lot of work, and I'm sure it looks obsessive to someone who couldn't imagine themselves doing all of that stuff, but it's what has worked for me.

So when I read posts on Fitocracy or hear trainers talk about the importance of "eating clean" or choosing "whole foods" or sticking to "paleo" or whatever else their thing is, I get really worried about the n00bs.  If I had truly believed that I wouldn't find success if I kept eating processed foods, I might never have tried.  How many people get turned off by "experts" who espouse certain methodologies or strategies without acknowledging the myriad ways in which one can become healthier?  I remember how badly I wanted to know, to understand the right way of doing things so that I could be efficient and correct and perfect.

It is a huge relief to be imperfect.  Knowing that I am choosing a path that is not some objective ideal but is rather what I need, it makes everything so much better.  It's still hard for me to interact with others on this issue because I sometimes interpret advice that contradicts my methods to be a personal indictment, but I know that it's not.  I know that advice about food is probably falling on deaf ears with me because, frankly, I'm not going to eat a pomegranate.  It's not going to happen.  But if that pomegranate helps someone else, well then, godspeed.

There's this concept called "risk management" that I think applies to fitness.  In risk management, you identify the courses of action available to you, look at the possible outcomes from all of those actions, and then determine what the risks and benefits are for each.  For a simple example: if I cut my finger, I have two basic options, to use a bandage or not.  If I use a bandage, I minimize the bleeding and minimize the risk of infection, but I also risk that ouchy feeling of taking the bandage off later.  If I don't use a bandage, I'll get blood everywhere and I might also get an infection, but I won't have to take a bandage off.  In my assessment, I determine that the better course of action is to use a bandage, and that the ouchy feeling later is an acceptable risk.

With fitness, risk management comes in to play all the time, or at least it should.  People often get overwhelmed with all of the new studies that come out revealing that basically everything is bad for you.  Eggs are bad, butter is bad, red meat is bad, caffeine is bad, and good lord is diet soda the fucking devil.  It'll give your cancer cancer.  If you eliminated every food from your diet that has ever been shown to have negative effects in humans, you'd fucking starve.  That's not to say the studies are bullshit or that you shouldn't listen to research on harmful foods.  If Splenda gives you stomach cramps, stop using Splenda, dick.

But if we're being realistic, you can't create a nutrition plan based on only eating and drinking things universally considered to be healthy, because that plan doesn't exist.  If you're trying to gain muscle so you're taking in extra protein, there's some problem to identify with every possible fucking protein source.  Eggs raise your cholesterol, beef lowers your lifespan, milk...god, don't even get me started on milk. To hear the milk-is-for-babies people talk is like nails on a chalkboard.  Milk is delicious, bitches!  Anyway, I digress.  Food science is not black and white, and neither should be anyone's thinking on their own nutrition and fitness.  So often, I've seen people foster this mindset of "well, if I can't get to the gym three times a week, I might as well not go at all."  It's such disordered thinking, but I understand where it's coming from.  There are plenty of things in this world that only count if you do them all the way.  Just watch an episode of Pawn Stars where someone tries to unload a half-finished car refurb that cost waaaaay more than they're ever going to recoup.  It's not hard to see how the all-or-nothing mindset finds its way into fitness and nutrition when, really, it has no place there.

This is why I try to keep my thoughts to myself when I feel myself getting critical of someone else's nutrition or fitness plan.  My internal mantra has become, "If they're not going to hurt themselves and it might work, just let it happen."  I know full well that I have no business being elitist about this stuff because, by all accounts, I'm doing it wrong.  I had chicken fingers and french fries four days in a row this week.  In a row.  That's crazy even for me.  But I also know that it's vacation, that my calorie counts are solid, and that I'm hungrier than usual because I'm running more and more every week.  Without any context (or maybe even with some context), someone looking at my food log might be horrified and assume I'm going to put all my weight back on in no time.  But I know better, and I don't need anyone else to agree with my shit.

So if you're reading this and you're trying to conform to some article or study or person's plan for the absolutely correct and perfect strategies for nutrition and fitness that, like, are the only way to do this stuff, take a moment and think about whether or not that plan, whole hog, is right for you.  If you skip the gym because you don't feel like doing what's on the docket for that day, maybe it's time to revisit the docket, you know?  Allow yourself to be a little inefficient and a little weird (a lot weird) and a little wrong.  Trying to be perfect means that you will fail every single day forever.  Try to be imperfect, a controlled demolition, and you'll succeed a helluva lot more.