The New Year, the New Me: Resolve

Resolutions are cute. The end of year feels like a solid full stop (a period––in American speak). It’s a chance to start a new sentence in my book––an opportunity to write a twist in my life story, a new quasi-beginning. What does this mean? 2010 was who I’ve been, 2011 is who I can be… “who I am” is somewhere between the life I live and the life I imagine.

At an African party in London, March 2009

On December 31^st 2009, I resolved to make 2010 the year of sober Aida. It seemed unimaginable to some who could only visualize me with a glass of shiraz attached to the end of my right arm like a prosthesis––enjoying the organic yet mechanical motions of daily carousal. 90% of New Year’s resolutions don’t last longer than one week. I, too, would have doubted my ability to pull off a booze-free year if it hadn’t been for the fact that on the night of the 31^st I felt like I was on day three of the worst hangover of my life. 31^st December 2009 found me back in California suffering the effects of a hectic Uganda-Kenya booze binge. I was so turned off alcohol; it was easy to swear to be done with that delightful devil.

Quitting booze had its perks. I’ve written about the caloric catastrophes of immoderate imbibing here. But I quit drinking for more than just the weight loss benefits. Drinking was an excuse for me to feel okay relinquishing control. But when I really thought about it… I was liberated, scandalous and comfortable at any level of intoxication or complete sobriety for that matter. I haven’t quite been able to figure out what I got of drinking or would get out of drinking again… and I still don’t trust myself to behave “moderately”… so for now, I’m comfortable not knowing when and if I’ll drink again.

Winter wear, November 2010

So what of 2011? Well, I would like to consider this thing you call “moderation” … primarily in terms of exercise. I’ve been on holiday for three weeks now––I’m eating like a queen, haven’t written down one calorie, working out about 3 times a week instead of 6 or 7… and to my elation, for now, my weight and size has not changed. In 2011, I will do a better job of marrying an active and healthy lifestyle with an equally rigorous dedication to my academic life, spiritual life but most importantly… social life! I will stop lying to people that I’m maintaining as I secretly try to lose more weight… really Aida… enough is enough. I’ve been teetering between veganism and vegetarianism… in the New Year… I will probably continue to teeter… and I will be okay with that. I don’t want to be afraid… of adding weight, losing weight, food, or hard work. I want to try new things and keep working on the old. I will run races. I will start dance classes. I will be resolute in my pursuit of the life I want to live; active in the making of the world I want to live in.

I saw this on somebody’s facebook page the other day:

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bye 2010! Hello 2011!

Happy New Year, Everybody!!

Nairobi sunset driving back from a day trip, December 2010

Failed Interventions

At my heaviest, nothing anybody said or did could have inspired me to lose weight. There was no piece of information, light bulb revelation, magic word combination capable of motivating me out of an appetite and into gym shorts. Which is something I sometimes forget when I feel that oh-so-human urge to share my feelings about how somebody else, usually somebody I love, seems to treat their body.

No matter how well meaning, it’s hard to hear and process a legitimate sentiment or reaction to my body for what it is. Quite frankly, I can’t think of anything more suspiciously condescending than concern. When people told me to lose weight, even out of true worry, care, kindness, love… I hated it. I hated them. I hated them, because it was easier to hate them than hear them. And even when I did hear them, all that translated into was my feeling bad about myself, about my body. A comment about my largeness was a rude reminder that it was not all in my head but in yours too, in the heads of others around me.

Nobody ever told me anything about my size I didn’t know deep down. So I teeter between appreciating the act of bursting delusions versus silently sanctioning self-destruction.

“You know such-and-such is bad for you” never deterred me from doing it. If anything it almost inspired a borderline moronic will to defy. I don’t always want to be good.

The most upsetting thing about somebody expressing concern for my size was that they got to leave when the conversation was over but I did not. At the end of the day, especially if I shared their concerns, I was left with this body we disapproved of. And to want to live in my body (something I had few other options but to do), I had to unhear or mishear words that hurt. To make my body liveable in again, to love myself and seek change in my own time for my own sake, I became immune to what others had to say. Correction. The things people said only hurt me, they never inspired me. That’s just how it was. I guess I had to find my own cliff edge, my own limit, fall over it, and rope myself back when I was good and ready. Because frustratingly remarkable people don’t hold the monopoly on willpower… lying at the other end of complete desperation, on the other side of my too far was my motivation. I lost eighty pounds when I found myself eighty pounds overweight.

My Salad Situation

Am I goat? Why am I eating leaves?

An edamame salad

Salad, like yoga, seems to some to suggest a personality type more than anything. In a Zimbabwean vernacular, you call somebody “Sa-lad” (emphasis on the last syllable) if they are snootily moronic… bourgwaaaa… la-di-da… shee-shee-fu-fu... uppity… precious.

The idea of eating an array of mostly raw vegetables used to make me a little angry inside. It seemed to symbolize some sort of extreme self-deprivation… a kind of torture I was quite happy to leave to some suburban housewives somewhere. It was a little too western for my already overly-westernized African self. When I visited Los Angeles for the first time, I got off the plane starving and my friend took me to a salad restaurant. I wanted to smack him… and all the other twigs in the joint munching away on grass pretending to be satiated by some carb-less existence.

But I changed. Over the past year or so, I’ve gotten into the whole salad thing… in kind of a big way. When I first moved to California, I was super-excited for what felt like all you can eat Mexican food all over the place. I drowned myself in chicken quesadillas... they tasted good. But these days, the idea of eating a chicken quesadilla does absolutely nothing for me. Aside from the fact that I don’t eat meat, my palate’s more excited by the bright and bold colors and complex of textures found in a giant salad bowl.

A spinach and berry salad with almond slivers

And size does matter! I discovered that part of the whole overeating and overweight thing had to do with the fact that I like to chew a lot… like I could eat a mountain of food. So, in a weird way, I get roughly the same amount of satisfaction sitting down and eating an entire giant bag of crisps (potato chips) as I do eating an entire giant bag of lettuce. I’ve done both, many-a-time. The difference is that one bag has about 1200 calories and the other has about 25. So… I pick the lettuce.

I’ve gotten really into the taste of fresh fruits and vegetables. And from eating them so often, I’ve reset my body, my appetite, my palate. I feel as though salad dressings hide or monopolize the taste. So I don’t use dressings, and I’m not into cheese (two things that… if you’re not cautious… can make your salad a de facto quesadilla… calorically-speaking). But I try to get the nice mixture of nutrients that a meal should have (carbs, protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, all that jazz). My salads have it all…fruits and vegetables and nuts and beans… hearty salads… good stuff. And when I munch away, I feel satisfied, energized, fueled and ready to roll.

Time Narratives

Okay, so it’s been about five million years since my last blog post… and even though I’m six days away from this humungous oral exam and in the middle of finals, ergo really in the middle of stressing myself with ideas about the time (I do but think) I don't have… I will take the time to write this post.

Before I got into a workout groove (a couple of years ago), my ideas about time were one of the biggest setbacks to committing to losing weight. Sure, I WANTED to lose weight… but where was the time? Now of course, I managed to find time to marathon all five seasons of The Wire while school was in session… I found time to develop, exhaust and quit various fads, activities, addictions. But when it came to eating right and working out… well I was kind of busy… and with all the school commitments, where was the time?

Well, it turns out time was there… on my lap… under my pillow… behind that 30 minutes of early morning facebooking… time was always there, even in my busiest moments. Time spent worrying about running out of time was time I could spend running. Because it turns out twenty-four hours is an ample amount of time, and so long as I budget it wisely (not wait until the last minute before working on something etc.), I had time. I have time. So even though I’ve been all stressed and unable to convince myself that I could take the little time to write a blog post, I’ve found the time to continue to work out and take care of my body.

Because all this time I, one, we have is ultimately time we don’t have. It’s convenient to plan to be better next time, soon, tomorrow, next term, next quarter, in the New Year, in the new millennium, any time but now… but now is what I know I have. So now is when I do it. In these two and a half months since my dad died, I’ve been filled with an overwhelming desire to quit deferring the living of life (which at times, funnily enough, translated into complete stagnancy… I couldn’t quite figure out what constituted living my life to the fullest). Because as one friend who lost her mum put it… and I borrow her words because I really couldn’t say it any better: “I found that I was living and loving as hard as I could because I wanted to be proud of myself- full of the certainty that if I was as whole a person as I could be, I wasn't wasting what she had stolen from her - life.”

This thing called life… this thing called my body… I live them now, not tomorrow, not in the New Year.

Give yourself time. Take it. Hell, steal it if you have to. Time is now.

And even when it doesn’t feel like it, ultimately, time––like your body––is yours alone.

this cartoon is unnecessarily morbid, but cracked me up anyway...

A Love Your Body Buddy

I’ve heard people advocate having a gym buddy… somebody to motivate you and another way to hold yourself accountable to some sort of physical rountine/regime. Generally, not a bad idea. Sure. But sometimes it’s hard to coordinate schedules, and besides… sometimes I don’t want company when I’m in get-it mood at the gym (I don’t need another witness to my crazy… my judging eyes can be more than enough). Similarly, when trying to “eat right”… that is refrain from wandering down the gluttonous path I am want to do… it doesn’t always help having somebody there to monitor your failure, point out what you already know, make you feel worse. If you are that friend, trusted with the task of keeping a buddy on track, you might notice them build a mild resentment towards you… mild turns to major… and next thing you know, you’re hearing rumors about yourself wherein you’re described as some sort of food nazi, gym drill sergeant, mad monster (all true, but still).

Language is a funny thing, a dangerous thing and a redemptive thing. Instead of a gym buddy, to whoop my ass into shape (or whatever other pertinent sadistic metaphor we’re often inclined to use), I charge my Love Your Body Buddy with keeping my thinking on track. When failing to eat super-healthy and hitting it hard at the gym are at risk of feeling like crime and punshiment, my Love Your Body buddy, puts things in perspective, reminding me that I am in fact human and not some sort of automated mistakeless machine. So on guilt-ridden days where words like sabotage, pigging out, demolishing, bad, losing (and not in the good way) or failing seem most relevant, she encourages me to re-think my word choices and thus my perspective.

The idea with a Love Your Body Buddy (LYBB - if this is starting to feel like a mouthful) is not to have somebody by your side shepherding you towards coronary heart failure or helping you to construct and maintain delusions wherein unhealthy choices have no consequences. Whether it's true or not, with self-love ought to come self-care. So being kind to both the inside and outside of your body necessitates a healthy and active lifestyle and mentality; working out and eating well become part and parcel of loving your body. Sometimes my LYBB and I meet at the gym super early in the morning, sometimes we go for long runs, frequently we encourage each other while navigating this vegan-vegetarian lifestyle kick we’re both on (more on that another time). But we neither police behavior nor unhelpfully sugarcoat reality. When it comes down to it, instead of becoming that person to dodge and detest, my LYBB is just the kind of person I love to keep around.

Boys Will Be Girls

This cracked me up so much...

I love the biggest loser... hopefully I don't ever sound like this.
I also love frozen yogurt. They're wrong though... red mango > fraiche > pinkberry

Fall Down

Fall (autumn) is that time of year when the coats and boots come out, and the body disappears from public view for a potential five to six months...only to resurface in March, April, not exactly looking how I remembered it. With cold weather out come the puffer jackets and the down coats, a whole array of outwear threatening to substitute inner care.

When everything around me is cold and grey, I struggle with keeping up a routine, be it working out or eating right. When I first moved to America in September 2003, I was excited to experience my first winter… SNOW! (Highly overrated). I quickly discovered that after the first day of fluffy whiteness, winter means less sunshine, less smiling, less moving, more eating, more drinking, more random sadness. My life in this country fluctuates from fun-filled and social, to cold and lonely. Up and down. Though undiagnosed, I’m pretty sure I suffer from seasonal affective disorder (hilariously acronymable to S.A.D)… and that’s pretty much how I feel when the weather changes. When sad, I find I conduct long debates with myself wherein I weigh the pros and cons of actually moving. The cons, the nays, offer really compelling points… such as… “coz no.” Braced with such a valid argument as to why I shouldn’t move, the task of even considering the gym or thinking about a run feels like a tedious chore. So it’s at times like these that I turn to my trusted friends... Nike.

What precisely are the folks at Nike on about with their little mantra… Just Do It! Do what? What is It?!

For me, It’s different every day. Some days, It’s putting on my running shoes, some days It’s entering the gym, some days It’s leaving my house, some days it’s leaving my bed. It’s whatever feels undesirable, impracticable, hard. It’s whatever feels necessary, albeit tedious. It feels challenging when I think about it, doable as I’m doing it, and not bad in the end. On days when I don’t feel up to it, or feel over it before it’s even begun, I channel Nike, get myself to the door, to the road, out of bed, whatever… and just do it. And when I’m down, doing something right, giving my body a workout, always feels good and brings me up, even if only for that little while.

Fat-shion!

One thing that drove 232 crazy was the frightening lack of imagination that hit designers as soon as they conceived of bodies over and above “the norm.” Even though the average American woman is a size 14… many stores that cater to young women (say Express or H&M) either stop at a size 12 or in some lucky instances struggle to make it up to a size 16 or 18 in their uber-super-duper limited collection. And it’s a stretch… For women audacious enough to be large, clothing found in the “Women’s” section of department stores tends to be spandexy or shapeless, paisley printed or beyond bland. It’s like the tailor gets cloth that he imagines to be large enough to throw over the woman, cuts a hole for the head, and voila! Ugh. Ugly.

I was a size 22. And at 24-years old, fatshion was frustrating. It was hard to feel amazing when I knew deep down, even in a large version, my curves were hidden by the frock-like quality of plus size clothing. It was hard to feel confident when I looked in the mirror and knew what I saw, what other’s would see, failed to reflect or express who I wanted to project (let alone who I was).

A little before my 24^th birthday, I discovered a plus-size store called Torrid and felt that at last, I didn’t have to be dressed in clothes designed for women above the age of 65. At last… booty shorts, skinny jeans, shapes! A woman I went to college with started a blog that I followed youngfatandfabulous and it introduced me to a whole other world of glamour and fat fabulousness. Big women could be fashionable and sexy… so long as they weren’t on a budget.

A desire to be as fashionable or tasteless as I pleased, a desire to look wild and whacky or modishly chic, a desire to affordably dress my best served as a major motivator. As I lost weight, my milestones were clothes sizes. I’d celebrate each dress size dropped with a mini-shopping spree and be sure to get rid of the larger sizes so as not to be tempted to backtrack. (Unfortunately, as I’ve gotten ride of my larger clothing, I can’t offer the canonic whole body in one pant leg photo). 

Today, I wear an American dress size 6 or 8. While it means I can no longer shop at Torrid, and because I have neither the talent nor time to design plus-size clothing, I relish the options the world will now give me. But uh… really… the world could stand to be a little more generous to bigger bodies.

SuperSize ––> Moderately Mad Me ––> SuperSkinny

During my weight loss months, I would tune into an American T.V. show called The Biggest Loser every Tuesday and follow the progress of a group of morbidly obese Americans dieting and exercizing their way to health. America has just about every type of reality show under the sun, covering all the usual juicy topics that promise to give us a glimpse into a range of lives: from rehabbing druggie celebs to maximum security prisoners to predator pedophiles. The reality of reality television is the more scandalously sensationalist the better. So naturally, my favorite genres of trash t.v are shows delving into the world of obesity: The Half Ton Man (1000 pounds!!! 450 kilograms!!!), The 650-pound Virgin, True Life: I’m Morbidly Obese, Too Fat for Fifteen, and so on and on and on. Did I find it empowering? Nah (except for The Biggest Loser). Did it make me feel good about my 232? Sure. Perspective… makes just about everything look good.

 But there’s one genre of reality show that America has yet to capitalize on and that is the other side of morbidly obese, the morbidly underweight. Now, had it not been lodged into yet another obesity program, I probably would not have tuned in. But the U.K T.V show Supersize Vs. Superskinny has just the right blend of bizarre, amusing and disturbing to get me hooked. For the large part of each episode, we follow a person who is usually over 350 pounds (160 kgs) swap diets and live in a house with a person who is usually under 80 pounds (36 kgs). I forget precisely what the objective of the diet swap is (aside for our entertainment). But we certainly get a glimpse into two extreme relationships to food. And we see how both exist along the same spectrum. But the other day it dawned on me… I might just fall somewhere along that spectrum. And that might not be the greatest thing.

There are a disturbing amount of things I have in common with both the morbidly obese and the anorexic.

The SuperSkinny. Usually women, but occasionally men, tend to have a disturbing relationship to caffeine. In order to have energy and zest for life as they undereat by 2 to 3 days worth of food each week, these people juice up on coffee and sugar-free redbulls and sometimes even chocolate for that sugar-high that keeps them going. I had quit coffee for a while there, but am back on it, and pretty much drink ridiculous amounts of energy boosters before I work out or when I’m feeling an energy dip during the day, instead of a good carby fruit or something. Some of the superskinnies approach their food intake and energy output in the same way that I have done over the past year and more. They know kilojoules in and kilojoules out, and they restrict or expend energy accordingly. I kind of do the same thing. Now, granted, my daily caloric intake is significantly higher than theirs, but still, we have a comparable relationship to eating and exercise. It’s all math for us.

The Supersizers. Bottomless stomachs… eating past full… eating to pass the time… eating because that’s what they do… hating that about themselves. The supersized are compulsive overeaters. But like alcoholics, taming the compulsive overeating beast, is a choice we make daily. The predisposition has not gone away, I just choose differently each and every day.

So here’s my confession: sometimes I feel like a supersized in a moderate’s body, curbing my enthusiasm with superskinny tactics. When I consider all things at the end of my day: my actions and behavior average out to that ever-proselytized and coveted “moderation,” but the thought-processes and brain energy that go into producing that result often belong to the extreme world of the supersized and superskinny. 

Flip-Flopping Fears

In 1988, a 145-pound Oprah came onto the set of her show wielding a cart full of fat and looking the smallest she would probably ever be. By 1992, she found herself carrying more weight, only this time not on a cart; Oprah was back up and at her all-time high of 237-pounds. And then she lost weight again and we were elated, gained it back and we were like… um; but then she lost… but then she gained, and lost and gained and lost and gained and with her body flux went my faith in weight loss. I was a believer, then a non-believer, saw the light, found the darkness, was converted, then I don’t know. On the one hand, if Oprah can lose weight (granted it helps to be a super-talented billionaire with personal trainers and chefs and maybe a humongous private gym or private strip of beach to run uninterrupted for miles or whatever), then surely I can! But on the other hand, if Oprah can’t master the maintenance game, Lord have mercy on the rest of us.



I must confess: sometimes I imagine there’s an expiration date to my weight loss. Like, I only have a few more days, or weeks to be this size and then midnight will strike, my carriage will turn back into a pumpkin, which I will eat as I make my way home to plus size. 


"I don't have a weight problem—I have a self-care problem that manifests through weight." -Oprah 


Do I have a healthy relationship to food and exercise? Probably not. Okay fine, not at all. Not yet. “Maintaining,” has turned out to be a silly little game of adding and losing unsubstantial numbers, minor flip-flopping. Sometimes maintenance feels like unsuccessful weight loss… all the work, but the number stays the same. I love working out, I get high on it, but I also feel as though I need to work out as ridiculously hard as I do just to have a functioning metabolism! I think about food and its nutritional value, way more than I talk about it, which is a lot (at least a lot more than I want to… I generally find people who like to talk ad nauseam about nutrition eye-rollingly tedious… I can’t be that girl). 


Each time I dropped a clothes size, I donated the larger clothes to charity. And being that I am not working with Oprah’s budget, if my clothes begin to feel tight, I step it up at the gym. I can’t afford to gain that weight back, emotionally or financially… or socially, apparently. These past two week in Uganda, I was showered with comments, compliments and concerns regarding this new body. As I’ve mentioned before, Ugandans are brutally blunt, so the most recurrent reactions mirrored this particularly memorable one: “Amen, THANK THE LORD… You were sooooo FAT!!!!!! It was terrible. Now you finally look your age and attractive.” …Ummmm… Thanks?  


While I can't currently conceive of losing the drive I have to keep up the work of  being less than 150-pounds, it's a fear that festers. But I appreciate Oprah's philosophy: "My goal isn't to be thin. My goal is for my body to be the weight it can hold—to be strong and healthy and fit, to be itself."

The Skinny Gene/More Loss

Some people find themselves genetically predisposed to be big. This was not the case for me; I was the outlier. I come from a family of pretty trim, quasi-athletic East Africans, which means back in my obese days, my size was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. Now Ugandans, not particularly inclined towards subtlety, would love to pass the time positing explanations for my “abnormality,” not all too complex in nature: “WOW: you love American burgers? You’ve become a big baga! Hahaha!” …um… noooooo… rude. So it seemed aside from my size inhibiting a true claim to the family name… my very nationality was on the run. In Uganda it feels like: to be obese is to be American; to be fat is to be rich; to be slim is to be sick (“sick” mean you have HIV/AIDs). So, it’s a tricky look. Like most people, places, cultures, your body is a canvas, the larger your canvas, the more you’re apparently trying to say, and the more folks seem to want to read it, read into it, read onto it.

Sure, sometimes there’s a story to read onto a larger than average body, and sometimes it’s really not that deep at all. I have several friends who have gone through bouts of depression or on the flip side the complete euphoria of coupledom or something, and consequently expressed their bliss or sorrow through weight gain or weight loss. I watched my first episode of the U.K T.V show Supersize Vs Superskinny, and an anorexic girl spoke about growing up in a single-parent household frustrated and miserable and equating eating food with rewarding positive feelings. It seemed a little bizarre and unfortunate that each day she felt she’d only earned half a piece of toast and some baked beans. In any case, it was clear she was unhappy, and a little weird, and her body was a canvas, with a Salvador Dali on it rather than a Monet or anything.

But the thing is, sometimes eating, such an ordinary activity, seems like the most ridiculous thing to do during abnormal times. Or sometimes it feels like precisely all that can be done.

If my body is my canvas, and if I am emotionally distraught, then food is my paint, a fork my paintbrush, and I find myself deciding between minimalist expression, or one of those hectic and questionable pieces of “art.” At least, that would have been the case on the plane today, until I realized, I was my own audience and nobody was studying me. And with nothing but time, over 500 movies, one book and my laptop, for the 15-hour flight from San Francisco to Dubai, the 13-hour layover I’m currently in the midst of, and the 8-hour journey to Uganda tomorrow, I figured I might as well reflect.

My father died yesterday. Dad had been a force: strong (I would cling to his leg like a Kuala bear as a child, and he would give me “lifts” around the house); athletic (I watch him workout at Parklands sports club in Nairobi four to five times a week); health-conscious (I can’t remember when I discovered that brown rice also came in white). His body fought and survived more health issues than most of the bodies I know. The past seven years had been hard for him as he slowly shift-shaped from a pinnacle of strength to the epitome of frailty. Now on my journey back home, to eat or not to eat seems like the stupidest question. My tears, my sadness, is that not enough, or must I wear my grief like a supersized or superskinny? The eating, denying, indulging, feels a little too much like an easy outlet to express my sadness. So, I'll try my best to find another way. 

A Big Black Butt: Fetish Fears

+80, I wanted so badly to be the kind of forward thinking, fierce, fabulous and fun girl I faked for years. Part of that meant trying to love each and every pound of me and being unfettered by the strong societal pull to satisfy an MTV-certified standard of beauty. Sure, I wanted to be smaller (heart health, more clothes options––extensive fat-shion blog entry coming soon), but I certainly didn’t want to loathe my big body not on anyone’s account. Luckily, not everybody subscribes to stick-figure aesthetics. In fact many people, many black people, many black men, rather fancy them selves a bootilicious, thick-thighed, chubby-waisted woman (at least outside of Palo Alto, San Francisco Area and in particular on the continent). So do a bunch of white men… fancy themselves… some big ol’ black booty… which has its history, politics and problems.

In any case, I’d be at the club, faux-feeling myself, and some dude would spot my T&A from a mile away and come salivating for ALL THAT! Which was great and sucked. Attention, from anybody, confirmed my 232 fabulousness, my +80 self. But that twinkle in the eye for the thick-thigh didn’t make me feel beautiful, it made me feel like a spectacle. And I just didn’t know how to believe or accept that when somebody expresses an attraction to a woman they do not know, it’s going to be rooted in visceral pleasure. Those are the laws of club attraction. For anybody approaching anybody they don’t know, it’s pretty much because they like the way they look.

So when a stranger approached me +80, if there was one thing I knew about them before they even opened their mouth to speak, it was that they liked girls with large breasts. I secretly wanted to be objectified for reasons other than my excesses. I wanted somebody to see my face and want that, not the jiggles, not the rolls, not all that extra. But +80, I found it hard to believe that anybody was looking at my face (even when and if they were). I guess I found it hard to look at my body, only wanting to look at my face (headshots only for facebook photos). So people looking at my body and not my face… it didn’t sit right. -80, kind people compliment my new look, and speak not only of my body, but also my face. But -80, I’ve come to feel very protective of my +80 former self. It’s hard for me to hear a compliment about -80, without hearing a serious judgment on or insult to +80. And sure, I judge her too.  I think and talk about her as an accretion of body parts, easily fetishizable. But I wonder, was it possible for somebody to lust my +80 self, while recognizing a different kind of substance, recognizing me as more than big boobs, big butt, and a big mouth?

In college, I acted. I played the role of Venus Hottentot in Suzan-Lori Parks' "Venus." The play is based on the true story of a woman taken from South Africa to Europe and displayed in freak shows, science labs and eventually a museum all because of what they saw as a humungous butt. In our production, they used a prosthesis on top of my butt (probably to conceal the disturbing reality, which was that they were going to stage the objectification of Aida's large body). During rehearsals, castmates groped away at the big butt. After the performance, I received more attention than I trusted. To be desired reassured... briefly... but to be desired as a fetish... traumatized. I'd try to tell myself, I am an individual, I am unique... but reactions and experiences like this kept placing me back into history. +80, I felt like a spectacle that nobody was looking at; seen and unseen all at the same time.

ac(COUNT)ability

Taming the appetite turns out to be quite the beast of burden for someone like me with a propensity for compulsive behavior. I eat. Maybe I’m a food addict… I’m certainly not a foodie… most people who’ve eaten my “cooking” would agree that I don’t seem to have a particularly sophisticated palette. But what I AM capable of is eating beyond hungry, beyond satisfied, beyond full. It’s annoying. When I started using my plate, taking note of what I ate and at what times, I was disturbed by the frequency with which I put food in my body. I was pretty much putting something in my mouth once an hour or so (didn’t even have to taste that good). It seemed clear I was satisfying an oral fixation, more so than pangs of hunger. It was a war: my mouth and hands vs. my stomach and mind. Hands and mouth had had the upper hand for a little too long. So I tried to find ways to make it hard to stomach the overly caloric, unhealthy stuff. I drank a couple of glasses of water before eating––stealing space (turns out the majority of the time we think we’re interpreting a hunger brain signal, we’re actually misinterpreting our body’s request for water). I ate hella fiber… anything for a false feeling of fullness. And because taste wasn’t that important to me, I made sure I had a good supply of healthy food.

I can’t figure out if it’s the smartest or dumbest piece of advice I’ve ever heard, but a personal trainer on the T.V show The Biggest Loser, recommended satisfying a craving for chocolate cake with a sugar-free piece of chewing gum. Um… okaaaaay…. If I want a chocolate cake, I don’t think a five-calorie stick of GUM will suffice! But I listened and allowed myself to develop a chewing gum addiction, which gave me something to put in my mouth when I wasn’t hungry but wanted to be chewing.  And of course I overdose on gum… but it’s better than overdosing on trail mix or granola bars or some other healthy snack (because I learnt that I could take something healthy and wonderful and make it my enemy––the thing hurting my cause).  4 or 5 granola bars, a super-sized fruit drink, oats and nuts cereal serving size for 5, still left me with 3000-4000 calories at the end of the day. It was better (than say a tub of icecream or whatever), but still hurting the cause.

Sometimes Hand, Mouth and Mind gang up on Stomach. It’s called denial. Denial is a powerful and useless beast. If I don’t write it down, it’s like I didn’t eat it. I don’t like to think about my slips, so I forgive myself for my transgressions pretty quickly and keep it moving. But if I don’t own it, then I don’t feel the need to make up for it at the gym, or even consider the fact that it’ll rear it’s ugly head in my weekly Wednesday weigh-in. Once I write it down, it happened and I can then deal with it. Secretly eating a brownie turns out to be the same amount of calories as eating it publicly. So I try to own it, accept it, and keep it moving (although public eating can have its own drama... and we can definitely talk about that). Same with weighing myself: I step on the scale every Wednesday, no matter what. If I pig out on Tuesday and feel like I know I’ll be heavier… not stepping on the scale doesn’t stop the weight gain. So I just do it, and whatever the number on Wednesday is, I own it. It’s the reality. Denial, avoidance, procrastination, and rationalization, that's easy, holding myself accountable, that's necessary.

In the Long Run…

This morning I ran 8.1 miles, which is about 13 kilometers. It was exhilarating, particularly because as I was doing it I realized I could run for eternity. I didn’t feel tired once… I just needed to hit the books after a while, which was the only reason I stopped when I did. I’ve never been a runner. But I’ve believed in cardio from the start: cardio to lose weight, strength-training to look good. When I started gyming it regularly, my cardio exercise was the elliptical machine and the elliptical machine only (you’re far less likely to strain your joints and it’s still a mega pound-shedder). But about three months ago, I decided I would become a long-distance runner.

There were a couple of things that sold running. First off, it’s pretty free. After a good pair of shoes, and a device for music on the go, I pretty much just need my legs. So when I’m away from home, out of town, on holiday, gym-less, I can still give myself a solid workout. It’s a great time to shift whatever gear you find yourself in, whatever mood's choking you, any stagnant energy you’re storing. I got into running as a way of subscribing to a culture that would allow me to maintain my weight loss by committing to an active lifestyle.

Because I know, accept and enjoy the fact that I seem to live by way of a series of evolving addictions, I consciously do my part to become subsumed by whatever I’m trending. So after a friend let me borrow her copy, I subscribed to Runner’s World magazine  … I joined a group on campus that runs to raise money for education (you should sponsor me in the moonlight run)… and I signed up to run a couple of 10k’s and a half-marathon. In 2011, I will run a full marathon (26 miles, 42 kilometers). It will be awesome.

Tips for the Long Run:

Playlists- choose music that makes you want to get up and dance (I started singing out loud during my run today… yes, it was weird… but belting GreenDay rocked)

Audiobooks – listen to a book on tape to get a good dose of fiction, to get lost in a story and forget about counting the minutes

Itunes U – download lectures from various universities for free, and start learning about something, you’d otherwise be too busy for.

Route – the more scenic the better: if not forests, if not beaches, house-scope in the suburbs, people-watch in the cities...

Say hi – you may be lost in your headspace, but even when you move through the world at pace, a friendly hello to a random on the street or a fellow runner breaks smiles.

Patience– you’ll get there when you get there. Like losing weight, don't plan to see radical results in 4 weeks, give yourself 2 years (I consistently lost just a little over 4 pounds each month). Time is... necessary.

Breaking the Bank for Balance: Yoga

Sometime between September 2009 and December 2009, I developed yet another addiction: Bikram Yoga. Before this, I hadn’t really done yoga. In fact, I guess I thought of it as a little wishy-washy, touchy-feely questionable “practice” that had white upper-middle class suburban housewives sitting comfortably in some weird body contortion chanting Om Shanti shanti shanti feigning depth to what were in reality their substance-less lives while the rest of us sweated it out in the real world of gritty grimy gyms. How could yoga of all things, practiced by the preciously petite, possibly be an option for my still plus 200-pound black self? Seriously! How?

Well, if I was going to become a weight-loss scientist, I figured I ought to experiment (besides, every time I came across an impossible move in my abs and glutes gym class, the instructor attributed it to either yoga or Pilates). A yoga studio in downtown Palo Alto (and there are quite a few) had a special first month deal. A low base price and then all the yoga you can ingest for a month (before they hiked the price back up filtering out any possible diversity). This particular studio specialized in bikram yoga, which is 90 minutes of 26 postures, oh and it happens in a room heated to about 40 degrees Celsius, 105 Fahrenheit… just the kind of crazy that intrigued me.

Yoga was real. I sweat like I had never sweat before, holding postures that awoke muscles that had lain dormant for decades. My muscles would ache for days after… the good kind of bad pain. Bikram yoga inspired discipline: you mustn’t eat three hours beforehand… you have to drink A LOT of water (because you dehydrate profusely)… and because you aren’t meant to breathe through your mouth, for 90 minutes of rigorous strength-training wherein I was lifting a 200-pound weight… that is my 200-pound self … I could only think about breathing. There would be thirty or more of us, mostly women, and yes, as it turned out, I was the only black body for miles. We stared at ourselves in large studio mirrors, but had no mind-space to think insecure thoughts; we could only think about one thing and one thing only: breath. Breathing. Mouth-closed, deep breathing. Deep. At the end of the 90 minutes––drained, when we could finally breath through our mouths, we were led in a collective sigh. The very first day I did bikram yoga, during the final sigh, tears accompanied the exhale. It confused me. I hadn’t been aware of any sad reflections or actually any thoughts at all. I had been so focused on doing the exercises, but somehow my body had gone through something a little overwhelming. When I could finally breathe again, the release was frighteningly intense... I was crying.

While yoga didn’t necessarily help the number on the scale go down, the rigorous strength training radically altered the shape of my body, tightened things up. I dropped several pants sizes, toned my body and began to build the physical and emotional strength it encouraged. One yoga teacher said: “honor where you are today, respect the journey your body has taken to get you to this place.” And I heard him. Slowly, I became less frustrated with my body for being unwieldy and cumbersome. I began to be thankful for the baby steps it was willing to take––steps that led me to the studio each and every day of that special discount month. 

Thought a lot about your touch...

I’m a theory-maker, so I like to juggle hypotheses all the time. Sometimes they’re dead on, some times they’re dead wrong, but I have a theory for just about everything. At 232 pounds, I believed, and I’m not yet fully unconvinced, that there was a profound distinction in the way people (friends, acquaintances, whomever) interacted with my body versus the body of my smaller-framed friends. That is to say, smaller bodies were treated with a kind of affection and sensitivity that I felt hard-pressed to come by. I noticed that when talking to these smaller friends, people were more likely to stroke their arm, touch their waist, maybe their hair, face, sometimes flirtatiously, but mostly platonically. Whereas, my friendly greetings rarely involved touch, sometimes they involved a mocking punch on the arm, or the odd “terrorist fist-jab,” if I was so lucky. Something about my frame seemed to unconsciously ward off platonic physicality… or maybe… something about a smaller frame invites the tender touch. And to be clear, I am talking purely about friendly dynamics between friends, relatives… anybody really but lovers. Now, I am and continue to be my only case study, so my theories come laden with holes and this one is no exception. Whose to say my personality didn’t detract the casual arm caress?

When I confided in a friend about this observation, he suggested I ought to see the gentleness with which folks interacted with one particular small friend as evidence of a borderline patronizing concern for her fragility. But I couldn’t help ask, and re-ask, and re-ask myself: in the world I found myself living in… were people capable of recognizing my big body as sensitive and worthy of gentleness? In the eyes of these anybodies and everybodies, had I lost my humanity? Did they see me as untouchable? Was my waist an unspoken no go zone? Could people only look me in the face? Were my eyes the only safe gazing-spot on my body? Would you be sweeter if I was smaller? I knew I was sensitive, but if you failed to see it… or society failed to let you see it… whose fault was that? Or more pertinently, who needed to change? Every question hurt. It hurt that I cared. My comfort with my body, my confidence, my happiness was, literally, in the palm of your hands.

Picture this...

two years ago...
yesterday....

Body Math: Food vs. Drink

Calories. Love 'em, hate'em, love to hate 'em... need 'em. I track what I eat through an online food journal called "My Plate" on the livestrong website
When I began to lose weight, i figured i ought to eat less than the daily recommended calories. I ought to eat less than 2000 calories. I figured, that was how much i had been eating all along anyway, right? wrong. so very very wrong. When i wrote down the calories i consumed each day (and I've never imagined myself a glutton of any sort), it turned out i was consuming anywhere between 3000 and 4000 calories daily. In what? Not chocolate cakes and McDonald's burgers... none of the usual suspects. I was easily wracking over 1000 calories every time i visited harmless seeming restaurants with my friends: a lovely little Chinese restaurant called Hunan garden (sesame chicken and brown rice), chicken quesadillas from Chevy's a couple of times a week, a little Thai curry... perfectly unassuming and tasty food.

But, to be honest... food was a smaller part of a larger consumption addiction. Anybody who conjures up an image of me as the social being I love to project completes the picture with a few Malibu and sprites (age 13 to 15), red red wine (age 16 to 18), corona light (age 19-20), long island ice tea (age 21), the return of the red (age 22-23), gin and tonic (age 24-24.5), water?! (age 24.5- present). I love social scenes, friends, people! a long conversation over the phone- occasion for some drinky-drink, a study session- celebrate the work almost accomplished with some "drank"!

I don't think there's anything wrong with alcohol. In fact, a glass of red is good for you, right? "A" glass. People love to dish out pearls of wisdom, going on and on about moderation. But here's the thing: I have a strong propensity towards compulsiveness. There is almost nothing, nothing, i have ever done in my life that i can say i did in moderation. From working to loving to drinking to partying to watching episodes of The Wire to you name it... when I commit, I commit. So, naturally, I was incapable of having "a" glass of wine after a hard day's work as i sat on the couch and chatted with my housemates... I'd have 4. And what that translated into over the course of time, was about 1000 to 1500 extra empty calories each day in pure alcohol. For the curious: gin and tonic (180 calories), corona (150), glass of red (160-ish) and the ever so delectable long island iced tea (780 calories). Now, apparently, if you eat on average 100 calories extra each day, over a year that can amount to a ten pound gain. So... it's not too surprising that by the time i was 24, I was over one hundred kilograms, social... but well... listening to doctor's telling me that i had a heart murmur, brought on by being technically obese at my weight. I've never told anybody that... I've been embarrassed. Every doctor I visited told me to lose weight. It made me thirsty for a nice cold glass of something delicious that would allow me to laugh the world and my so-called problem away.

As a 2010 new years resolution, I quit drinking. I was already 40 pounds lighter, eight months in. And to be real honest... I decided to quit drinking bent over a public Kenyan toilet looking at the contents of last night's dinner and drinks, the morning after a night I will never ever forget. It was gross. I was done. Turns out, I'm already a "liberated" and fun-having person whether i have a glass in my hand or not, so it wasn't all that challenging. I can still party till the break of dawn (inspired by a little red bull or some coffee) and make the kinds of mistakes I loved to make when i was intoxicated. I never blamed it on the alcohol... I knew it was me all along!

Before and After

A number is a number, a word is a word, but the picture tells the story...

Losing It: body and mind

On April 6th 2009, I decided to lose weight. Easy enough? Well, I had made said decision about seventeen hundred times throughout my 23 years... probably beginning with some Jane Fonda videocassettes that my mum and I did together when i was eight years old and feeling a bit fat. But this time was different. I decided to commit to writing down every single thing that entered my body and every kilo-joule of energy I exerted. I'm a smart cookie, I thought, if i can get a PhD from Stanford (which remains to be seen), then I can master this "science" of weight loss that those skinny bitches on t.v go on about. And despite studying performance, I'd always had a knack for equations and math; so I figured eating less, plus working out more equals weight loss. Well, it was and wasn't that easy. What lay ahead in the eighteen months that followed were physical struggles and victories made only more challenging by the numerous psychological battles that accompanied them. Today, eighty pounds and eighteen months later, I still struggle with many of the challenges I faced from the onset... control... do i have it, have i lost it, am i losing weight? my mind? or myself?


I'm going to try to be as honest as I can. In these posts, I will share the pretty and the not so pretty. This blog is in response to the numerous friends and folk who have asked me to reveal the ever elusive "secret" of my weight loss. It is also today's daily dare on the livestrong facebook site, and i pretty much do as livestrong commands. I hope sharing my weight loss journey will do what you need it to do... inspire if you seek inspiration, reassure if you seek reassurance, entertain if you have no weight issues (in which case, i hate you, get off my blog... kidding... kind of), or just satisfy your curiosity.