SomaCow

This is a blog, working to keep me answering the question, Do You Want To Die? I am Geoff. Pleased to make your acquaintance.

Today I was inputting my food intake to Lose It, software I use to track calories and exercise, and I happened across a message from a friend saying “Sensa. It works when you are ready.”

Rather than ask facebook to bear my load, as it were, with a 500-plus word reply, I figured now would be a good opportunity to explain my thinking regarding diets, supplements, juicy juices, foot-toxin absorbers, banana pepper suppositories, add-ons, belly shakers, and other weight loss paraphernalia.

I am against them.

Easy! Whoa! Before you fire up the world-wide internet and copy-paste thirty seven new studies and your friend’s pants that tell EXACTLY why what I just said isn’t true. Stop throwing stuff, and listen.

I got fat eating too much food, certainly, but I also ate bad food. Me getting healthy is about taking steps.

I was talking earlier about putting together a cost comparison of my life now to my life a year ago. I am still working on that, but what I have learned in the meantime is that I used to eat a lot, sure, but I used to eat a lot of very bad food.

I would once console myself, when I was crazyfat, that at least I was getting a good balance of meats, veg, bread, and very little salt and sugar.

I was lying to myself. My weekly diet would often consist of 10 or more trips to restaurants and fast food establishments. I would eat tons of food, but, worse, tons of chemicals. Preservatives, emulsifiers, food dyes, refortified nutrient content, fat blockers, additional sweeteners, modified gums and -itols, acids, artifical flavors, partially hydrogenated buttsechs cream, and on and on and on.

The list of food additives that I do not encounter now is frightening and long.

All of that shit does not all come out in your shit, I believe. It stays with you, like an unwanted holiday houseguest, still laying about come Flag Day, monopolizing your resources and working against your objectives.

There is evidence that suggests weight loss is, at best, stalled when foods that are not food are consumed.

I am hereby calling artificials, supplementals, and all the other crap being sold to us as UnFood. Like the UnDead, it is difficult to disperse UnFood, it may kill you if you are not careful, and people generally do not believe the truth about it until it is too late.

Did you ever notice that just about every fat person you know that does not want to be fat drinks diet soft drinks? AND YET THEY ARE STILL FAT.

Did you ever notice that just about every person who sprinkles fat inhibitors on their food eventually finds that lost weight again?

Did you ever notice that all of the diets, drugs, supplements, and such are always sold on late night TV, or on failing radio stations, or in the back of crappy, desperate publications?

Think about Apple, as a product. I do not care how you feel about Apples. That is irrelevant. Just think about the Apple product. Computers that work so well, they were able to open a whole store consisting of just display models of their computers. Think about Goodyear tires. Think about any product that is reliable enough to stand on its own merit, and be sold as such.

If a weight loss product existed that worked, it would be in its own store, not on aisle 72, behind the steroid socks at your local general poison center.

Myoplex, the shake, apparently has high levels of arsenic.  Olestra makes your anoos ache. Atkins can trigger health disorders.

Sensa makes your body fail to digest and utilize fat. It does nothing to the cholesterol, high sugar, high salt, etc. that you are consuming. Why not just swallow a trash bag, and then eat your food, and when you are done, pull the bag back out?

I am trying to get to a place where everything I put in my body heals me, makes me whole again, provides a nutrient, and enriches my cellular makeup.

I am trying to stop evaluating foods SO much by taste. I tasted lots of yummy bad stuff for a long time. It is time to put away those things, and eat to live, not the other way around.

I believe people should do what works for them. Right now, I have lost half the weight to my goal by eating good food, not eating shitty food, and walking when I remember to do so(getting a BIT better at that).

Who is to say when I get down to that last 80, 50, 20 pounds, and cannot lose the weight, week after week, month after month with no change, that I too will not seek out some shady solution in a bottle?

I can’t say never.

But for now, fuck no! Do you have any idea what the longterm effects of that Sensa shit will be? Me neither.

Want to know my REALLY effective weight loss technique?

Eat seven servings of vegetables a day. Go ahead and try. It’s quite a bit of chewing.

For an added challenge, no salt, minimal olive oil, no butter. Pepper is fine. Steamed or raw is ideal.

By the time I plowed through all seven today, I didn’t even want to TALK, I was so mouthsore.

Thanks, as always, for advice, tips, and suggestions! I consider everything, and I try to research the hell out of it when you folks suggest it. I hope you see that I am not adhering to a “get skinny quick” scheme or plan.

I am building a body to care for my daughter’s father.

I ate a lot, I have the diabetes gene, I stayed inside too much. Shocker of all shockers, I now am learning to live, or at the very least not die, with diabetes.

It’s amazing, the neighborhood I live in. There are people who spend their whole afternoons bustling in their yards, warshing their cars, watering their begonias, trimming up their crepe myrtles (sadly, not a pancake), and generally just being outside all evening long.

There are all kinds of birds, and dogs, and a snake, and possum families, and a cockatoo, or maybe it was a cockatiel… I am only sure of the cock.

There are buzzards in the sky, and a moon, and various barbecued smells, and spanish rice smells, and burning maple leaf smells.

There are crunchy underfoot leaves, and crunchy underfoot acorns, and crunchy underfoot kitties (ack!). There are hills, and ponds, and cute little yard things that don’t do anything but rust. There are myriad wonders on my streets.

There are stodgy neighbors, and friendly neighbors, and stoic neighbors, and republican and democrat neighbors, but I don’t hold it against either of them. There are hot neighbors, and smelly neighbors, and neighbors that wave back (my favorite kind!)

There are also two wonderful girls, willing to traipse about with me as we lap the neighborhood.

We chat with each other, and squeal with delight at the butterflies and dog poop, and build up a healthy appetite for the dinner (SHARK MEAT!) we will cook together.

This evening, a year ago, would have consisted of eating Popeye’s Fried Chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, cole slaw, and biscuits drizzled with honey. In a carbohydrate and salted fat stupor, we’d have drooled ourselves into a doze-coma watching Food TV, or some god-awful reality show, while our child fussed at her lack of stimulation and stayed up, possibly too late, watching her dad slowly kill himself between trips to the bathroom.

Plus, stinky smoke.

I really, really enjoyed tonight.

Not just for the great dinner, conversation, and some light exercise. Not just for the nice weather, friendly neighbors, and happy child.

I enjoyed it because it can be like this all the time, if I merely insist that I try. My wife is supportive, my kid is up for anything; the only person that was holding us back… was me.

It’s like we were on a stagecoach, aimed for the cliff, horses lathered and laboring, wheels fittin’ to bust off, and I kept whipping and whipping and whipping, driving us ever closer.

I am glad I put down the whip.

I am glad I am letting go of the reins.

The horses may lead us to water, or perhaps make us think.

But they don’t want to die.

I have no idea what I am talking about. Man, shark and green beans ROCK!

Woke up with a blood sugar of 272 today, came home with a 174. My body continues to raid its extensive and vast cookie jar of fats overnight, marauding the samoas and peanut butter delights long ago tucked away. Good riddance. For all my glorifying of eating, I have always hated the fat that comes with it.

I must fast for some bloodwork tomorrow, and I am looking forward to it. As the pounds come off my body, I relish the loose clothes, the light step, and the almost smug, self-righteous feeling weight loss gives me.

So much about fat is worthless and strange to me. It physically binds you, constricting around your body and muscles so you cannot move. It clogs your arteries, so you cannot pump blood properly. It makes you less appealing to the opposite sex, limiting your procreation opportunities. It makes you sweat, and thus stink, more. It leads to more zits.

While it once might have indicated wealth and position, fat is now a sign of a troubled organism.

When I quit smoking, I often had to physically restrain myself from beating the shit out of other smokers. Not just because the smell makes me want to throw up, but because they were killing themselves. They were playing with poison, and forcing it in, slow and sure.

Do THEY Want To Die?

I bet they do, most of them.

Maybe that is why I want to grab them, and slap them, and force them to stop. Every time I see a smoker, and now, a fatter, I see a man or woman on a ledge, inching themselves toward oblivion. I wish they would step back from that ledge, my friend.

But they won’t. Not unless they decide to for themselves.

I keep looking for a picture at my “worst”. Fattest, whatever. This is a shot from March of this year. Please, do not show this to children:

Note the eyelids, weeping pus, starved of sleep. At this weight, I could not even pick up my daughter without wheezing. Check out the cheek skin, swollen and thick, asymmetrical and frightening. The greasy hair, the stinking clothes… Well, you probably cannot SMELL the clothes, but they smelled of sour sweat and stank ass cigarettes. This was me, locked into Chantix, and dying a quick death.

I want to hit him. He disgusts me. But I know he made the right decision.

Eventually.