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MaamJay -> RE: A few Extra Pounds or More (2/25/2008 12:13:03 AM)
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Warning ... this is a rant LOL!
One of the things that frustrates Myself and Master most is the familiar refrain "it's all about diet and exercise". Sorry, but We are living proof that it's not. For the past 2 years, under the care of dietitians, We have both been eating about half the general Australian adult recommended daily allowances of fats and carbohydrates. I lost a bit of weight at first, but now have remained frustratingly stable on a weight loss regime. Master has stayed stable throughout, as He has pretty much since His teens! We attribute that, in part, to the thyroid surgery for cyst removal He had when He was 10. We get moderate exercise, given issues with back injuries (from car accidents, not weight-related), knee injury (from playing cricket) and tendency to heel spurs. We are currently looking into getting an electric treadmill to allow Us to exercise more easily and regularly during Our wet season, but are frustrated by the inability to hire a machine capable of taking Our weight ... have to spend over $1500 buying one instead, and even that one won't take Master! Who do they design these damn things for? The skinny and trendy show-offs it seems! It doesn't seem unreasonable to Me that We want to find out first whether it works for Us, or whether it aggravates injuries, before outlaying that sort of dough.
What's often forgotten is the impact of Our genes, yes, those little bits of DNA We inherited. If only I'd inherited Dad's genes for metabolism ... a real meat and potatoes and don't put any of that orange or green crap on man, he ate lots of fried English meals like egg and chips, steak, egg and chips, egg, fried bread and chips, roasts dripping with fat, bread and dripping ... you get the idea! And he was skinny all his life, never even gained weight after he retired. Absolutely frustrating for Mum and all 3 kids, who all inherited her metabolic genes which are obviously very thrifty and believe in saving everything in case of famine! I remember only too well, when I was with my first hubby, when a Dr put me on a Very Low Calorie Diet of 600 kcal per day. I stuck to it religiously, and my hubby made sure of that (being a firm believer at that point that it was all about diet too! He recanted). I didn't cheat, not one morsel. I went back to the Dr ... and I had actually GAINED a couple of pounds. Accused of cheating, both myself and hubby hit the roof. As he says eloquently, the only thing I lost was my temper! I won't allow myself to be put back onto anything that restrictive again, because the worst part was that I ballooned even more afterwards.
Even more annoying in many ways, was when I needed venous surgery 20 years ago and was told the problem was weight related (so why was it only in my LEFT leg and not my right???) and was sent to an endocrinologist to hopefully lose a bit of weight prior to the surgery. He put me on a dietary regime, a bit odd as it involved eating a boiled egg every morning (oohh those fat grams!) ... and the weight fell off. It was bizarre, I felt it was totally beyond my control, I had no idea what I was doing that was so radically different, in some ways I was eating more than usual. I lost 6 stone (about 40kg) in 6 months ... and had the surgery. It was awesome ... I was down to Aust women's size 14-16, what should be an average womanly figure before everyone decided they wanted to look like prepubescent size 8-10 (those figures were intended to represent ages originally). It stayed off for a couple of years ... I stuck to the maintenance plan ... all seemed marvellous. Then it began to creep back on. Half a stone (about 3 kg) was enough to ring alarm bells ... I went back to the reducing plan ... no effect ... I stuck to it even more religiously than I had in the 6 months where I was losing ... I kept gaining. However it had "tricked" my metabolic genes the first time, they weren't having a bar of it this time around. The endocrinologist I'd seen had retired, I tried others ... no insights other than to eventually call it "adaptation" ... yeah well, I'd guessed that LOL! Slowly but surely I went back up ... to where I had originally been and then a bit beyond, as is apparently typical. Well, I still have some photos to prove I did once have a waistline LOL!
So, please don't thoughtlessly throw the "just diet and exercise" message at all and sundry. It's untrue and it's hurtful. If I could choose, if it was really that easy or straightforward ... do you think I would choose to make life harder for myself, getting diabetes etc, by being this size? NO! Though thank God, there's finally some decent clothes available. But very large people still have an extra hard time making it in this world. Too often the word "fat" is used with words like "lazy, stupid and ugly" ... and the correlation drawn isn't necessarily valid. Sure, there are some fat and lazy, fat and stupid people ... but there are also skinny and lazy and skinny and stupid people too! But they never get labelled as such, it's a real double standard! And honestly, we don't all sit around all day eating whole chickens, stuffing cream cakes into our mouths and eating 2 litres of icecream at a sitting! The media attention to binge eaters hasn't helped at all. Some of us eat less than skinny ones!
However, sometimes fat people make it more difficult for themselves, or allow the skinny world to totally control them. One final thing that makes My blood boil and that's all the ads for various weight loss programs that feature people, usually women, saying things like "now I am so much more confident" or "now my social calendar is full" etc. Confidence and social skills do not have to be linked with weight. They come from inside you, not outside. Being fat has only definitively stopped Me from doing one thing in My 51 years of life ... riding on a hire Waveski during a honeymoon in Bali. The operator was only too blunt - "No, you lady, you too fat". {The fact that the new hubby went on it anyway leaving Me feeling miserable on the shore should have been a big red flag! Yes, he's the ex}. It's stopped Master only once too, a seat weight limit for a helicopter joyride (which wasn't mentioned in all the glossy brochures, nor when I booked and mentioned We are big people). I've held high profile jobs. Both of Us are musos, We get up onstage, play, sing and shake the booty! And the audience enjoys it. Sure, Master probably finds it harder to get work being big, but potential employers aren't game to openly cite that as a reason. I refuse to be dictated to about who I can be because of what My body is.
And in terms of BDSM ... Master has a sexy slavegirl with lots to play with and i have a sexy Master with built-in buddha pillow ... and I know I am a sexy BBW Domme with built-in twin pillows waiting for a subby who will appreciate them! To quote one of My favourite Aussie women songwriters, Judy Small (who isn't!) ... Roly Poly People YEAH!
Maam Jay aka violet[A]
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