Fat is My Friend

The USDA Food Pyramid, officially introduced in 1992.

 

Repeat after me: "Fat is my friend!" No, no, not the kind of fat that creates jiggly jowls and blubbery bellies. One look at some of the horrific fat photos below and you have to know that I hate that kind of fat, rolling around under my skin, quivering when I laugh or cough, getting in the way when I tie my shoes, and forcing me to move my favorite clothes to the back of my closet.

No, I'm talking about healthy dietary fat, which has been given an undeserved bad name since the USDA started publishing its guidelines for a "healthy" diet in 1972. By urging more consumption of grains and "sparing" use of fats and protein, those governmental guidelines have created more obesity, heart disease, diabetes, celiac disease, and metabolic syndrome (and that's just for starters) than probably any other fad in the history of humanity.

 

Thankfully, over the past 10+ years, more than 60 well-executed research studies have demonstrated the health benefits of low-carbohydrate diets that include healthy fats. The real culprits have been identified as sugar (in all its varieties) and the overuse of grains, especially refined grains, in the typical American diet.

 

As for the dangers of wheat in particular, well, that's a whole other blog topic. For that, I'll refer you to Dr. William Davis's excellent book, Wheat Belly.

May 1969: That's me at age 14. Not fat!

(With my old boyfriend Carl in Fresno, California.)

 

I was only 13 when I first became convinced that I was fat. Old pictures and videos prove that I actually had a nice figure, but I was a big-bosomed girl at the height of skeletal model Twiggy's popularity, and so I felt freakishly large. However, when I was 25 I really did start putting on some poundage. By the time I was 26, I was 40 lbs overweight.

In the summer of 1982, when I was 27, I started having anxiety attacks and other strange issues. After a series of doctor visits, I was diagnosed with hypoglycemia, aka low blood sugar. Since it was a condition barely recognized by the medical profession at that time, there was little to guide me. Some doctors were even (erroneously) telling hypoglycemics to eat sugar when they felt a spell coming on! So I rolled up my sleeves and did my research.

 

Ultimately, I developed my own hypoglycemia diet, which I followed religiously for years. Not only did all my weird symptoms vanish, but the weight began to melt off. Within 4 months I had achieved my dream weight and I felt amazing. 40 lbs were missing, and I wasn't looking for them! What I didn't know then, but I know now, is this: without realizing it, I had put myself on a low-carb diet.

October 1987: The weight was still gone when I was 33!

 

Then I got married in 1989 and started having babies. As a new teacher whose husband was an unskilled laborer, and living in a resort community with a higher cost of living, there wasn't much money to spare. I was hit by a double-whammy: my metabolism took a nose-dive and our diet began to consist heavily of cheap grain-based meals like macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, and Ramen. With cheap ice cream for dessert. The weight crept back on over the years.

 

By Christmas 1999, I was 65 lbs overweight. I wanted to cry when I saw myself in family pictures around the Christmas tree. I was so frustrated. I'd been knocking myself out to lose weight since my second child was born in June 1991, and now it was 8 years later and I was bigger than ever. I'd restricted my fat and calories, as dictated by the wisdom of the 1990s, until I was living on as little as 800 calories per day, feeling weak and crabby all the time (just ask my family). I might lose a few pounds, but within a week or two I'd gain it all back plus a lot more, while I was still starving myself.

Thanksgiving 1998: Hiding behind the kids didn't help!

Dylan (16 months old), Mark, Sarah (age 9), me, and Jacob (age 7).

 

In February 2000, my doctor called me in to talk about my cholesterol, which had hit 250 for the first time. He showed me his own cholesterol test results, which were even higher than mine, and then showed me his second test results. He'd cut his cholesterol in half in just 2 months. He explained how a low-carb diet works and recommended that I read Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution.

 

That book and I were inseparable. I started the diet the very next day and immediately saw results. In 6 months I lost 56 lbs and felt the best I'd ever felt in my life. My LDL cholesterol came down to 199, my HDL went way up, and my triglycerides all but disappeared. Again, I kept the weight off for years. Occasionally, especially around the holidays, I'd cheat and gain some back, but I could always get back to low-carb eating and take the weight off. I think I was a little bit in love with Dr. Atkins.

 

Until my metabolism changed again...

September 2000: Thanks to Doctors Paxman and Atkins, I'm 56 lbs lighter.

Sarah (age 10), Dylan (age 3), me (age 46), and Jacob (age 9).

 

By the time Mark and I divorced in 2006, I was almost 52. I'd returned to my old eating habits, cheating on breads and sweets and Lay's potato chips, and so I was putting on weight again. Again! I blamed the stress of the divorce and becoming a single mother, but I was sure I'd be able to take the weight off quickly when things calmed down so I could get organized and focus on eating right. Guess what? It didn't happen this time.

 

I really tried. I'd read everything ever written about low-carb eating and I knew how to do this. But try as I might, I couldn't make it work. As long as I controlled my carbohydrate intake, I'd lose a couple of pounds and then stay at that weight. If all I'd wanted to do was maintain, it would have been perfect. But after a few months I'd get frustrated and start cheating, regaining those few pounds and a few more, repeating that cycle over and over again. 

 

By my 55th birthday in 2009, I'd hit my highest weight ever. I was 90 lbs overweight. On top of that, I was having heart problems. I had developed a benign arrhythmia during my last pregnancy, in 1997, but now my heartbeat was sometimes so irregular that I'd end up in the hospital. The nurses couldn't even get a blood pressure because there weren't enough beats in a row. My cardiologist told me sternly that this would keep happening as long as I was morbidly obese.

October 10, 2009: Me (ugh!) with Sarah (age 20) at Meteor Crater.

I started the hCG diet exactly 3 weeks later, on Halloween.

 

Morbidly obese! No one wants to hear those words. And it wasn't as if I weren't trying. I didn't know what else to do, so I started praying. 

 

First, my cardiologist invited me to a nutritionist-guided clinic for weight using the hormone hCG. I told them I was interested. My sister-in-law Dana had told me about hCG 6 months earlier, but I thought it sounded crazy. However, if my cardiologist okayed it... As it turned out, I never did participate in the clinic, but after that I met several people who'd lost a lot of weight on hCG. As usual, I did my research and decided to give it a try. My experience with hCG is chronicled in another of my blogs, HCG and Me. Click here if you want to check it out:  HCG and Me

 

The hCG diet surpassed my wildest dreams. Between Halloween 2009 and May 14, 2010, I lost 77 lbs. Again, I felt wonderful and I swore to myself that my days of yo-yo dieting were over forever.

May 14, 2010: I'm pretty proud after losing 77 lbs!

That's also the day I met my second husband.

 

Alas. After I remarried in 2010, my new husband and I took an Alaskan honeymoon cruise and immediately started off on the wrong dietary foot. After that, for the three years of our marriage, we traveled a lot. It's hard to eat right when you're on the road, especially when you weaken at the sight of sugary sweets and fluffy breads. And it didn't take long to discover that Ed and I should have spent more time getting to know each other before we rushed into marriage. The stress in our home was almost unbearable, and we both comforted ourselves with food.

 

By the time we took our final trip together in June 2013, to Atlanta, Georgia, I had regained every single pound of the 77 I had lost. What can I say? The South really does have the best hash browns in the world!

 

13 June 2013: Ed and me at Hard Rock Cafe in Atlanta, Georgia.

By then I'd gotten back to my heaviest, at about 90 lbs overweight.

Then, just 3 weeks after our return from Atlanta, our marriage ended violently. Ed moved out and I spent months grieving what could have been but never was. I also lost my appetite for the first time in my life. What the heck, I decided to go with it. I still couldn't lose weight on a low-carb diet, and though I'd retried hCG a few times during our marriage, I could no longer make myself stick with a 500-calorie-per-day, low-fat diet. Plus, the FDA had made it almost impossible to get the hCG hormone. So I pretty much quit eating while I grieved.

During that time, I began reading about other women of my age, dedicated low-carbers who were having the same problems losing weight as I was. Apparently a typical low-carb regimen can become less effective for some women as they hit menopause, and some adjustment is needed. This means decreasing the amount of protein and increasing the amount of healthy fats. In fact, a number of people had begun experimenting with something Dr. Atkins called the "Fat Fast," just a few short paragraphs toward the end of his book, and they were having good results. One of these women had just released a new Fat Fast cookbook.

 

So I ordered the cookbook and started eating again. Not much, because 1,000 calories on the Fat Fast isn't a lot of food...but I get ahead of myself. I'll share more details about the Fat Fast in future posts. For now, I'll just tell you that it really worked. Between late June and November 3rd of 2013, I'd lost 45 lbs and felt very good.

29 Sept 2013: That's me after losing 41 lbs in 15 weeks.

Five weeks later I'd lost 4 more lbs, for a total 45-lb loss!

I wish that were the end of the story. Unfortunately, the holidays hit, the divorce turned ugly, Jacob moved his mad baking skills back home, my stepson and his wife moved in with us for 5 months (along with their southern-style comfort cooking), there were two weddings to plan, and there was more traveling, among other huge life changes and stressors.

 

In the end, I regained all but 20 of the 45 lbs I lost. But I did keep those last 20 off, so it wasn't a complete failure! Since March I've been struggling off and on to stay low-carb, and I've actually lost another 7 lbs, so my total loss since June 2013 stands at 27 lbs. Not much, but a start. 

 

That brings us to why I started this new blog, dedicated to the low-carb lifestyle and, for those of us post-menopausal women who need it, the Fat Fast.

 

You see, exactly 8 weeks from today, I will be driving with my children to Anaheim, California, for a lovely 8-day vacation. And I am determined to lose 20 lbs before we make that drive. I don't want to be hobbling around Disneyland with my current lack of energy and achy joints and stiff back and shortness of breath. I want to feel great when I curl my toes in the sand at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and run laughing from the waves. I don't want to avoid the camera when we immortalize our good times.

 

To achieve my goal, this is my strategy: I intend to document every bite that goes into my mouth for the next 8 weeks. You'll help keep me honest, and together we'll watch to see whether the scales move down as quickly as I hope they will.

 

I started back on the Fat Fast today, so let the ride begin...!