Chicken Soup for the Dieter's Soul (23 page)

1 teaspoon dried rosemary

2 medium zucchini, cut lengthwise into ½-inch-thick slices

2 medium yellow summer squash, cut lengthwise into ½-inch-thick slices

2 red onions, cut crosswise into 1.2-inch-thick slices

Salt, to taste

White pepper, to taste

¼ cup balsamic vinegar, or less, to taste

Preheat oven to 450°. In a small bowl, stir together the olive oil, crushed garlic and rosemary.

Line a large cookie sheet with aluminum foil and arrange vegetables evenly on the foil. Drizzle the oil over the vegetables and toss to coat. Season vegetables to taste with salt and white pepper. Transfer vegetables to the oven and roast for 20 minutes.

Remove vegetables from the oven and drizzle with balsamic vinegar to taste. Serve immediately or at room temperature.

Reprinted from
Fitter, Firmer, Faster.
©2006 Andrew Larson,
M.D., Ivy Ingram Larson. Health Communications, Inc.

My Last Twenty Pounds

L
ife is a tragedy for those who feel, and a
comedy for those who think.

Jean de la Bruyère

My last twenty pounds and I have a part-time relationship. Ten of those pounds are a group of homebodies. They wave off their more mobile relatives and stay firmly put. The other ten leave for the summer, but as winter approaches they must think of the family they left on my belly because they come back home for the holidays. I watch their comings and goings confident that, when all of us are ready, we’ll never see each other again.

I’ve lost another forty pounds permanently. It took two years for them to go, but we parted as friends. It wasn’t always easy giving up the protection they provided.

For most of my life I have been embarrassed by emotions. I thought that there was a difference between how I felt and how I was supposed to feel. Good people, I thought, didn’t get so angry, unhappy or whatever this new feeling cute boys inspired was. By my early teens I was twenty pounds overweight, to buffer the space between my embarrassment and the world of slow dancing and kissing.

That buffer was not enough as my feelings became complicated with artistic passion, real romantic desires, a sense of dissatisfaction and a mysterious inadequacy in the face of love. The more complex and unfathomable my feelings became, the more I sought to numb them.

As adulthood progressed, I numbed my emotions by strengthening my five physical senses. Here was a wealth of experience I could understand through eating. The visual changes in the patina of crust as dough bakes into bread. The aromatic bouquet of red wine as it breathes. There was also the musical sizzle of butter browning in the pan. And taste. Everything has one taste as it crosses the lips, another on the tongue as it is transferred to the teeth for chewing and still another as it travels down the throat. Perhaps surprisingly, since I had gained another twenty pounds, this was also a highly sexual time in my life. The satisfaction my senses brought me through food, drink and sex replaced the shame of dealing with depths of feeling and the realities of intimate connection.

The world of the senses did not protect me. My so-called romances brought disruption. I developed a fear of being alone. I was worried I would be seen as a stereotypical fat girl, unworthy of love or acceptance. There were loud arguments that I knew would turn violent if I didn’t stop them through some gesture of self-abasement. During this time, I abandoned my sensuality and sought the comforts of fullness. I did not care what I ate. I did not care how it was prepared or if it was quality food. During this great emptiness, I gained twenty more pounds.

Then I got smart. Suddenly, I started talking to people about what I was feeling. I realized I had to take care of my emotions and the information they were giving me. To learn to feel, I discovered, was to learn to communicate and to make lasting connections. I did not join a gym and find true love there. I did not discover a magic formula to erase years of poor eating habits and a tendency to overindulge. I did not become an ascetic subsisting on leaves and water.

Instead, I discovered there was some essence in me that I shared with every other human being on the planet. Sharing my own feelings with the people I met and listening to their experiences was enlightening. I began to live with my sensuality rather than for sensual experience. I no longer believed that I was fundamentally different, and I stopped being embarrassed by my own emotions. I believe that the first twenty pounds came off through the release of that heavy burden.

The second twenty pounds were a practical and methodical loss. The many options of lifestyle change were often overwhelming when I needed to focus on coming out of numbness. Simplicity worked for me. I learned that frozen vegetables are the working person’s best friends in the kitchen. They are inexpensive, quickly prepared, and come in a huge variety of flavors and colors. I learned to exercise every day, even if it is only ten minutes of stretching. It helps to ease stress and frustration. I stopped watching television after 9:00 PM. It made me feel inadequate with my physical imperfections and then tempted me with fast-food commercials.

The last twenty pounds and I are still figuring things out. They make their occasional forays out into the world, and I learn gently how to experience life without them. It’s a new emotion, but I’m finally open to feeling it.

Kate Baggott

Setting Goals and Reaping Rewards

When I talk about my weight loss to people who have never had a significant weight problem, I tell them that I did not see reality in the mirror. Sure, I knew what the scale said and what size I wore, but before losing seventy-five pounds, I only saw what I thought were my positive attributes when I saw my reflection. I saw fabulous hair, expressive eyes, youthful skin and a pretty face. I didn’t see what 225 pounds really looked like on a 5’2” frame. My brain, in denial, didn’t let me see my fat.

I realized I was truly obese when I overheard another therapist at the clinic where I teach children with learning disabilities tell a parent, “Your son’s teacher will be the heavyset woman in the staff picture.” I had taken a picture with several colleagues, and the picture was framed and put in the lobby where I worked. There were four fit women, and then there was me. On a day when I thought I looked my best, I photographed as a fat, frumpy, middle-aged woman. I was devastated.

Having never been successful with a diet because I never truly thought I needed one, I didn’t know where to start, so I just stopped eating. For a month, I lived on salad, diet soda and anything with zero calories, especially zero-calorie gum and hard candies. I bought a scale and saw “225” staring back at me, but with this semistarvation diet, I saw no change. I told a friend about my diet and the frustration of not losing. Her reaction was, “That’s because your body is in starvation mode. You have to eat or it stores fat.” She said she ate five or six small meals a day, was never hungry, and unless she binged, she kept her weight down.

It’s often difficult to take diet advice from a thin person, but I knew my friend understood nutrition. Knowing my eating habits, she suggested Atkins. I bought the book and my husband and I decided we could be happy with this change of eating for the long term. We decided that this couldn’t just be a quick diet and then back to bad habits; we would have to change our eating habits forever. Atkins was not a difficult diet to follow, and within days of starting a low-carbohydrate lifestyle, we began to see the scale move downward.

As an educational therapist, I had the added advantage of knowing what setting goals and receiving rewards does for children who see what appear to be insurmountable problems. I have often used goal setting and rewards to help them achieve more than they thought they could. I decided I needed the same motivation to keep me on track. I kept a chart for myself and my husband and posted it on the mirror in our bathroom. On it, we wrote our weight and measurements. On mine, I also listed my goals and the rewards. Crossing off each one was also a reward in itself.

My goals were very simple and fun. When I lost ten pounds, I made my hair lighter. When I lost ten more, I got my ears pierced. When I was down thirty pounds, I added more holes in my ears. I told my coworkers, friends and family about these, and when I had something new, such as a third hole in each ear, the reaction was a positive, “How much have you lost? I see you rewarded yourself!” There were additional goals. I had a red suede jacket that I had bought years earlier and quickly grew out of. When I fit into it again, I went out and bought a smaller black suede jacket for a lot less money because I didn’t have to buy it in a specialty store for large women.

I had set up goals like weighing less than my husband and fitting into a pair of tight white jeans like the ones I was wearing when I met him. As with most weight loss, the early pounds are the easiest. As time goes on, there is still loss, but the amounts tend to be less. Getting rewards for goals made the potential frustration seem more attainable. Throughout the last year, I’ve mentioned to people that when I lost seventy-five pounds, I was going to cut my hair short. For years, I hid behind a long mane of hair, which I thought hid my size. In fact, it was a security blanket of sorts. It hid nothing.

Several weeks ago, I had it all chopped off. Snip. Snip. Snip. Over two feet of hair fell to the floor. The reaction from almost everyone was that I looked great and YOUNGER. When I got on the scale after my haircut, I weighed two pounds less, too! Of course, I lost two pounds of hair! I’ve even dyed my hair back to its natural color, knowing now that I need no more disguises or security blankets.

I also no longer need rewards. I have another twenty-five pounds to go, and the reward now is the weight loss and the knowledge of how much control I have taken of my body, my life and myself. That’s the greatest reward of all.

Felice Prager

No More Pancakes on This Woman’s Shopping List!

T
he family is one of nature’s masterpieces.

George Santayana

Everybody in our family looks forward to Saturdays. Nobody has to think about work or school. We sleep late. Even Tobby, our cocker spaniel mix, appreciates that.

All families accumulate traditions, large and small. It has been a Saturday tradition in our family to sit around the breakfast table together and dig into pancakes made from a packaged mix. We’re not all maple syrup fans, but we each have our own pancake ideas. Some of us prefer pancakes topped with powdered sugar, others with a dab of strawberry jam, others with sliced peaches. Over the years, we’ve experimented with all varieties of pancake possibilities.

Toby takes his pancake plain, cut into a dozen or so pieces, in his dog bowl. Toby is so enthusiastic about our Saturday breakfast routine that we call him our Pancake Prince. Every Saturday for six years, Toby has practiced, if not perfected, his pancake habit.

Turning over a new leaf, the day came that two human members of the family were about to turn forty. Call it a midlife crisis if you must, but they decided to adopt a healthier lifestyle and shed a few of those extra pounds around the middle. The result was that two parents and four teens got involved in sports of all sorts—basketball, soccer, even in-line skating. Saturdays were no longer the same. The pancake griddle was retired to the back of an upper cupboard. Instead of lounging in bed for extra hours on Saturday, we all got up about 8:00 AM to go for a brisk walk with Toby. Over time, the distances increased. That is to say, a few blocks in spring became a few miles by fall. Except for the first weeks, nobody seemed to mind the exercise.

Toby continued to check his bowl for something special, but there were no more Saturday pancakes to be seen in our house. No pancakes with butter, no pancakes smothered in whipped cream. The humans were eating (and enjoying) fresh fruits and dry toast, maybe some plain cereal. That was the extent of the Saturday breakfast gala. It was indistinguishable from a workday routine. We talked about what foods we bought and we talked about what we ate. Shopping lists no longer mentioned pancakes, and the kitchen table had healthy food on it seven days a week.

Nobody dared discuss the good old pancake days, perhaps fearing the very mention might somehow invite invisible calories. It wasn’t just the humans who lost weight, of course. Toby, no longer being the resident Pancake Prince, also took on a leaner shape.

Another lifestyle change for us meant almost no snacking, so Toby could no longer expect to be treated to a peanut or pretzel when the family was watching television. Watching television? Who had time for that anymore? With baseball season and swimming, followed by soccer and then all the half-marathons, it was just about time for football (and maybe a little leaf raking around the yard). Could we find time for some serious ice skating before it was time to shovel snow? The entire calendar had become very active indeed!

The crowning moment came about two years post-pancake. Toby had the vet’s permission to accompany two of the kids walking a half-marathon. By then it seemed as if they’d been in training for what seemed a lifetime. The former Pancake Prince and his human pals got cheered along the entire route. Nobody doubted the trim trio clinched the blue ribbon for best of show that day!

Roberta Beach Jacobson