Weighing In, Weighing Up

I woke up this morning and weighed myself for the first time in about a week and a half, for a reality check.  The number was up.

I have been trying to distract myself by thinking and emailing about the new release in one of my friends' favorite UF series.  (Iron Crowned by Richelle Mead, book #3 in the Dark Swan series.  Initial consensus: mixed.)

It's only working to a certain extent, because this weight gain comes from nothing I'm really doing on purpose.  I mean, I am.  I'm putting food into my mouth on purpose.  I'm digesting it on purpose.  I'm eating slightly more protein on purpose.  But while weight loss and gain and maintenance come down to simple math, I don't sit there and crunch the numbers.  So.  I feel puffy.  I feel squishy.  I feel scared.  I'm trying to psych myself up about it, go through the logical motions meant to defeat cognitive dissonance.  But...  Yeah, no.

Here.  Have a falcon.  Because I like falcons and because it's today's Wikimedia picture.

Andreas Trepte

www.photo-natur.de

commons.wikimedia.org

Off-Topic and Obligatory: Unions

I can't be the only one who is a little appalled that the DOWN WITH UNIONS!!! thing is going on when we are but one month shy of the centennial anniversary of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.  Surely this irony isn't lost on most people (well, on most people who are aware of what the fire was, what it signified and set off in American workers' rights movement, in the women's rights movement, in the immigrants' rights movement, and so on...).

Seriously, guys, read some of the interviews with survivors.  Read about the justice that didn't come (ever) for the owners of that company.  Read about the total disregard for life and limb (of others, of course).  You read that and you try to argue with me about unions.  No, the teachers in Wisconsin aren't fighting for unlocked fire exits so they don't burn to death.  Yes, they are fighting for quality of life, and in many ways symbolic and tangible, that fight started after the Triangle fire.

I had classes in that building when I was at NYU.  In my AP American History class we had a whole unit on the rolling intersection of the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, and the New Deal, so the location of the Triangle fire was already in my sphere of knowledge when I had my first classes as a freshman Drama major.  These days, that's primarily a College of Arts & Sciences building, but most of my required theatre studies classes and a handful of electives were there.  I had several, over my four years, on the eighth floor where the Triangle fire started.  It's a neat old building.  Technically NYU connects two buildings there; I forget what the other one's called, but it's the home of CAS and has beautiful views over the Village and Washington Square Park.  Really beautiful, with lots of staircases, lots of fire hoses, lots of sturdy fire escapes, lots of sprinklers.

Something else I experienced frequently while at NYU?  Student teacher strikes.  I don't know what the situation is like now, but the president (John Sexton?) had a reputation for exploiting student teachers.  Furthermore, the student teachers weren't allowed to unionize.  A lot of the protests and pickets I witnessed took place at the northeast corner of Washington Square Park, right at the College of Arts & Sciences building, right where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company operated.

Food Labeling: An Anecdote

Yesterday, in the interest of not losing more weight, I picked up some chocolate covered pretzels while I was at the drug store.  I wanted chocolate, but I also wanted something that felt a little more snack-like than, say, a Snickers.  Plus, chocolate- or yogurt-covered pretzels aren't really a problem for me.  Any person with an eating disorder has plenty but PLENTY of foods that someone might look at and go, "Really?  You have no problem eating that?  But you won't eat [less logically frightening food]??"

Anyway.  Pretzels and I are okay.

As I was putting about the third pretzel in my mouth, I saw this:

Being a good little sleuth, I followed the asterisk.  I saw this:

So then I figured I'd see exactly what the "flavor" came from.  I saw this:

Okay, I thought, at least cocoa is ON there.  Though by its place in the *cough* "confectionery coating" ingredients list, it's maybe 5% of the coating.  Then, just for kicks, I took a gander at the nutritional info, with my finger covering the calorie info.  

Now, listen.  Fat and I have no problem.  We're BFF.  Yesterday I told my doctor that I'm basically subsisting on bananas, low-sodium V8, walnuts, almonds, and white chocolate right now.

But that?  Up there?  "Confectionery coating" is not worth THAT.  

I went back out and got an overpriced, imported dark chocolate bar.  It was the least I could do.

Let's Ponder Some Disturbing Things

Disturbing Thing #1

This is Scabior, the Snatcher from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as brought to life on screen by actor Nick Moran.  Scabior, we must understand, is a nasty, evil villain in both the book and the movie; the movie ups his creep factor by having him sniff Hermione's hair and generally be threateningly suggestive.  Nick Moran, we must understand, is an empirically attractive actor.

Here's the Disturbing Thing:  People are shipping Scabior and Hermione.

Which just goes to prove (again) if you make it pretty, no matter how Bad it is, people will like it.

Update: Disturbing Thing #1a, to go with Deathly Hallows Part 2


Disturbing Thing #2

Hospitalizations for problems caused by eating disorders grew 18 percent from 1999 to 2006, with the steepest rise among children under age 12 (up 119 percent)

Fabulous!  Great news!  The obesity panic is working!  And it's exciting to see mental health treatment in this country be really prioritized!  Nothing helps someone with a psychological disorder get better like taking away all their treatment options by not reimbursing for them!  Awesome!

You know, I think those are the only Disturbing Things I care to deal with just at the moment.  Carry on.

Why Food Rules Piss Me The Fuck Off

(Or, "In Which I Eschew My Usual Eschewing of the F Word ['Fuck,' Not 'Fat']")

I was about to go to Starbucks.  I was going to get an eggnog latte.  I googled to see if I could determine the eggnog latte's availability so far this season, and the top page was this one:

www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/eggnog-latte

You know where that goes?  To a nutritional chart right smack dab in front of your face.  I didn't know how many calories were in an eggnog latte.  I didn't want to know.  I wanted to go order a tall nonfat fucking eggnog latte with no fucking whipped cream, and I wanted to fucking enjoy it.

Know what happens now?  I have two choices.  I can go to Starbucks and get a tall nonfat eggnog latte without whipped cream, and I can drink it, and I can try to enjoy it, but I can just about guarantee you that I will crash and burn at that one.  Or I can sit here and not have an the latte, and not feel disgusting and horrific about myself... Until I start tallying up all the other calories from today, because seeing calories is a huge trigger for me.  All I wanted to know was whether the eggnog latte was available yet.  What I got instead was (to me) harmful information without my consent.  (Getting pissed off writing this post is my attempt to distract myself from the urge to tally until it passes.)

Last Friday, Mike Huckabee was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, and they talked about the "nanny state" and weight loss.  (Huckabee used to be quite overweight.)  Maher (about whom I have such mixed feelings that they could've come out of a blender) told Huckabee he was wrong about Mayor Bloomberg wanting to institute a salt restriction on foods in NYC restaurants.  No, Maher said, what actually happened was the public decided it wanted less salt and restaurants started to respond to that.  Capitalism.  Actually, Bill was wrong, and Mike was right.  I posted about the NYC salt restriction at the time, pointing out that our Mayor was imposing his own food hang-ups on our whole city.

But you know, it doesn't matter, ultimately, if a food rule imposed on the masses came down from on high or evolved from a grass-roots obsession.  Starbucks, for instance, posted calorie information long before Bloomberg instituted his calorie rule (which was separate from the salt issue).  In the obesity panic, no one stops to consider whether the obsession gets us anywhere, and people like me (sorry, I do occasionally insist on being counted, you know) don't just get disregarded; we get hurt.

Another thing Huckabee noted in his Real Time appearance was how he'd grown up with a mindset that allowed him to have a very unhealthy relationship with food.  "Were you good?  You get ice cream!  If you weren't good, you get no ice cream."  (I paraphrase.)  Huckabee had to re-contextualize food in order to have a healthy relationship with it.  Do I ever get that.  Food as reward or punishment is huge in America; all splashing calories around at "celebratory" food places does is add a really sick ingredient to an already ailing recipe.

Contextualization is key in the whole obesity panic/disordered eating dichotomy.  So what the hell kind of context are we constructing with the passive-aggressive posting of calorie info, whether at the supposed behest of the masses, or at the father-knows-best recommendations of public policy makers?  We're constructing a shitty, passive-aggressive context, and that is why food rules piss me the fuck off.