A Chicken In My Pot: Cooking as the first step to detoxification

The most toxic part of my diet has been that I am alienated from real, home-prepared food, coming to rely on energy in the form of liquid calories from soda, a steady stream of candy and fattening fast food quality meals. This week I've done a great job of making dinner for my husband and myself; hearty (and caloric! and fattening! and delicious!) meals worth about 59,025 Weight Watchers points that serve to reconnect me with food that is chopped, cooked, that has flavor, texture and a variety of nutrients. We've eaten vegetables regularly for the first time in an embarrassingly long time and already we both look and feel better. We did go out one night, to Wendy's, but even there I made a sensible choice by choosing a chicken sandwich and baked potato.

I'm sure someone is reading this and thinking, "See, that's why your ass is fat. You need to just eat a damn salad." Maybe you need to eat a salad but really, I need to eat food of all varieties. I have a profound anxiety about food--are they good? Are they bad? If I make spaghetti carbonara will I feel dirty and like a stupid fat person? Isn't it better just to cook nothing at all, work myself into a tizzy where I am so hungry and desperate that I have the excuse that I only ate McDonald's/Wendy's/pizza/gyros/deli sandwiches because I was soooo goddamned hungry and busy?

Part of my problem is that I eat only under 'duress', denying myself until I am exhausted and can excuse my bad behavior. Somehow, I've worked it out in my mind that the fattest thing I can do it to premeditate a caloric meal. Fantasizing about Burger King all day and then eating it is unexcusable--repressing all thoughts of food and then hastily ordering Chinese food at 4:30 PM for *lunch* is, somehow, okay. Stumbling home on the train at 5:00, snacking all the way is somehow okay. Stumbling through the door and agreeing with hubby to order oil-slick Indian food is somehow okay. By the time I can think straight, vast quantities of food have been eaten and I hate myself. Just by planning menus and cooking, I am disrupting the cycle of thoughtlessness and owning my responsibility to nurture myself in a reasoned way.


I am a food addict and by my reckoning, today I am 7 days sober. Alright!

Drugged: Coca Cola

If you aren't someone with a food abuse problem, even if you aren't as thin as you and Vogue think you should be, you can't comprehend how much a food or food product can mean to your life. Coca Cola is a large brick in the structure of my obesicon. I occasionally drink other sodas but really, all I need or want on a daily basis is a Coke. Or....5, since the two twenty-ounce servings I generally consume would equal. Some people drink a forty of beer on the corner, I drink a twenty of Coke at my desk, sipping high fructose calorie after high fructose calorie as the caffeine rushes through my bloodstream. And then I drink a twenty (or more) of Coke at home as I surf the web, work from home, watch a movie with hubby, scarf down dinner....What does Coke do for me? It wakes me up, suppresses feelings of hunger, calms me down, stifles headaches, makes my tongue happy. It makes *me* happy and I am never so happy as when I can actually *start* my day with a Coke and...muffin, bagel spread thick with scallion cream cheese, anything really.

And what is this ersatz joy doing to me? Sending my blood sugar into the stratosphere and crashing back to earth. Putting me at risk of diabetes, no doubt.

And calories: 40 oz. of Coke a day = 500 calories a day x 7 days = 3500 calories a week

How many calories are in a pound of human fat? Oh yes! 3500.

How poetic. How convenient. No wonder I'm 50 pounds overweight.

So as of this week--no more full-calories soda. It's absolutely verboten for the next 60 days. And then, when I'm not under the influence, I can decide what sort of relationship I want to have with one of my drugs of choice.

So when am I going to start doing *something*?

Well, today, actually.

The husband and I just ordered groceries from Fresh Direct, a minor miracle considering that we haven't (well *I* haven't) cooked in months. My hubby does many, many things for our household but cooking isn't one of them. As a consequence, if I don't feel like cooking, we eat out. And if we eat out, we eat very badly, packing in more than a 1000 calories in some meals, I'm sure. As I've said before, my goal is to establish and maintain a healthy, normal relationship with food. I may or may not 'diet' but mostly I want to get out of my habits of secret eating, shameful eating, unbalanced, nutrient-deprived eating. So we've planned dinners for this week, some of which absolutely are high-fat, high-calorie but which nonetheless represent for me a 'coming back' from a place of hysterically bad pseudofoods that have been responsible for my latest 20 pound gain.

I've also started to make peace with some demons. In the past, I've lost weight, gotten down to 145, size 10ish, and been really happy. But now that I am over 180, knowing this makes me ashamed that I threw away that hard work, ashamed that I once was strong and am now weak. But looking back on journal entries from that time has deflated some of the myths around my first large weightloss: I was very moderate, but persistent, in what I did. I was no heroine, even to myself, and I bitched and moaned constantly. I don't have to be ashamed of past weight loss and I can, in fact, look back on that effort and grow from it.

Being Alice Walker's "Ms. Sophia"

Growing up I luckily wasn'st pudgy enough to be the target of children's "fat" taunts so I never was compared to Alice Walker's character in the 1985 movie The Color Purple, played famously by the then-obese Oprah Winfrey. But now, as a fat adult, as a fat black woman who works in the beauty industry I frequently think that I am perceived as fat Sophia...big, dark, undesirable, asexual even though married, of no importance. I don't necessarily feel this in the context of my own company, but at industry functions I'm struck less that I am a black woman but that I am fat/chunky/chubby/heavy/rotund black woman who isn't glamorous, isn't cute and therefore cannot matter. I think of all of the times where I am the heaviest woman in the room (and I do weigh less than 200 pounds, mind you) and how this makes me a sort of extreme I never want to be.
My coping strategy is to take this outsiderness, this difference and work it to my advantage. People don't forget my face, don't forget my body, don't forget my crazy pouf of naturally black hair and so I try to make it work for me by being politely defiant and refusing to let any of the beauty industrial complex norms get to me. But of course they get to me and I've noticed how I'm not taken with the same seriousness nor treated with the same respect as my thinner, taller, blond colleagues. I sometimes feel like, as Don Imus hatefully said about Gwen Ifill, and as Ms. Sofia was in Walker's novel, "a maid."
And since I know my own intellect, my own personal power, my own complete story I'd gladly be that--a maid. Except for the fact that I know such a perception depresses my own earning power, makes me more subject to the 'last hired, first fired' phenomenon that characterizes the working lives of so many black women in any industry. All because I'm no one's idea of cute, all because I'm svelte. This scares me, irritates me, makes me sad. I'm not changing my body for anyone except myself but it is so frustrating that it should even matter. I have many gripes with the 'fat acceptance' movement but their arguments about the unfair economic impact of fat discrimination on the earning power of fat people has a point.

Today was a good day

As much as I want to be thin--and really, desperately, I want to be a size 12, a size 10, a blessed size 8 more than anything in life right now--I want to have a normal relationship with my body. If sane, balanced eating and sane, balanced exercise leave me with unslim, so be it. And today was a pretty good day on that front.

This morning's tea was followed by popcorn. I had a normally portioned lunch with my friend and a normally portioned dinner with my husband. I don't feel any thinner but I do feel saner.

It's 8:53 AM and I want candy

Absurdly, before 9 AM I want to eat candy. And in fact, if there had been banana Now-And-Laters in my purse rather than the too-tangy pineapple variety, I probably would be eating it right now. Even Mango would do.

(For you that are not fluent in the composition of Farley's and Sathers Candy Co.'s finest product, Now and Laters generally come in flavor trios. My poison is the Tropical Pack.)

It's a cornerstone in my Obesicon that I use sugar to get through my commute, which is why the candy is in my purse in the first place. When I finish work, I'm physically and mentally exhausted. During the day, the people in my small, frantic office don't stop to take lunch --yes, I'm serious -- and no one takes breaks. This allows me to leave after 5:00 many days but when I do, I'm shaking with tiredness and in no shape to stand up for 55 minutes on the New York City subway. So I grab something sugary, shove a few pieces down my gullet, put on my iPod and try to get through my commute without fainting or killing my fellow commuters.

Well now, it's 9:21 and I haven't eaten the candy. I feel good. I've been drinking unsweeted Twinings Pepperment Herb Tea. It feels good to have reflected and stoppeed a destructive behavior.

Sophia is:

Since if you are reading this blog, you may be curious to learn the rough outline of my identity, here are some biographical points....

I am

a survivor of depression
right-handed
heterosexual
short
a mercenary for the beauty industrial complex (yay. or something. some days i love my job.)
large-breasted
wide-hipped
full-lipped
wild-haired
black / african american
atheist (former taoist)
married (for a year)
an older sister
the adult child of an alcoholic
a once-abandoned child
a gemini
intp

Who I am, Why I'm here

Who am I and why am I here? Well I'm Sophia and the simple answer is that I am 28 and don't want to be fat by the time I'm 30.

But I am here writing not only because not only do I suspect that if I don't begin to introspect about my weight and why my ass is 50 pounds over where it should be, in two years' time, I'll be 75-100 pounds overweight, but because I am beginning to see that my use of food is self-abusive. That I am using food to not only comfort and satiate myself but to disfigure myself. I need to work through what this all means because I am damaging my soul and my corpus with this behavior.

So this is what's up:

This blog aims to be am interesting, intellectual, potty-mouthed, explicit exploration of my weight and battles with the obesicon, the matrix of behaviors/memories/events/triggers/habits/fears that surround my fatness and ugliness. I am hoping that the writing here will be funny, smart, raw. But sometimes it will suck and sometimes there will be typos. 'The Obesicon' does aim to be brainier than a lot of weightloss blogs, not because they are bad but because the knee-jerk suck-on-a-no-calorie-lemon approach is something that I've outgrown and it's time for me to talk real talk to myself about my feelings, experiences and fears. I'm inviting voyeurs and commenters but this is a public journal chiefly for my own benefit though I do really help that someone finds this and locates the sort of inspiration and support I found on blogs like the dearly departed skinnykat and the active blogs to which I link.

I am a black American woman and should you choose to follow this blog, you will find meditations on race, heritage, economic privelege and how they intersect with issues of weight and self-image. I use black vernacular English too--deal with it. I'll also let you know more than you want to about what I eat, how I exercise and all the mundane things associated with weightloss.

'The Obesicon' is an experiment and one day will no doubt abruptly disappear. But if you are intrigued, welcome for now. Let our journey begin.