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.