I can never seem to put across a simple idea and just get it over with. This is probably one reason I have never given up swearing; because it is simplified language, it forces me to state my thoughts in simplified ways*. Anyway, so the following is not a simple one-sentence opinion about the whole Jack Kruse, MD affair, but at least it’ll be a short post. Here goes.
Dear faileo community:
1. It is possible to hack a Facebook account. Happens every day. Has happened to people on my friends list, in fact, NOT that this statement constitutes an engraved invitation to any random assholes out there.
2. Someone has already demonstrated it is possible to start a spoof Twitter account.
3. Screenshots can be faked.
4. People have disciplinary measures taken against them every day for minor infractions (and sometimes for zero infractions, but falsely accused) while people who pull major bullshit get let off the hook again and again. In the field of medicine, this is why we have malpractice lawsuits; too many doctors are still licensed who do not deserve it. I can’t even be convinced that the disciplinary listing I saw for a Dr. JOHN Kruse was the one and the same Dr. Kruse we are all discussing here. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. He still has his MD, he still has his license. He could be one of those aforementioned who is guilty of major bullshit–but then again, maybe he’s not. I don’t know, and you don’t either. Until you PERSONALLY WITNESS something, you will continue to not know. And you can proclaim your superior knowledge and intellect to any credulous sheep you like over the next ten to twenty years and rake in the Facebook fans and the ad revenue. You’re still a pissy-faced little know-nothing who likes to slander people with whom you disagree. I’d be threatening to sue you too, if I had Dr. Kruse’s lawyer money and a fan club like you.
5. Speaking of which: It’s perfectly acceptable to get outraged and angry and threaten consequences when someone calls the FBI on your ass on the basis of a false report and humiliates you in front of a few hundred of your friends and admirers. Didn’t you know? Don’t you remember how the faileo community responded to Gary Taubes daring to argue with Saint Guyenet at the Ancestral Health Symposium last year? That was just a heated argument. No authorities were called; no one’s freedom or future was threatened. Now ask yourself how you’d react in Kruse’s shoes. You’d be crying like little assholes and calling your mommies and you fucking know it.
I’m afraid I put Dr. Kruse a bit on the defensive recently, and I’m probably putting him even more so on it now, in some ways, and I hate knowing that. He’s welcome to read this blog, crappy as it is; he’s welcome to stay on my Facebook page if he likes. But even if he’s truly up to the sort of fuckery that I read about today with allegedly posting up fake pictures of his back, fact remains he’s helping people. And some of the people he’s helping are people that you fucking faileos would turn away because fat people are such a drag, man! Ew!
Don’t bother looking at me like that. There are reasons I don’t read most of you anymore, and you’ve done one bang-up job demonstrating nearly all of them in the past two weeks.
Go to hell. Which ain’t Paleo either, come to think of it.
No love,
Me.
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*Naturally, this is not the only reason I swear. If there were about one billion fewer assholes in the world, that’d eliminate another reason. Also not the only one. I could go on all night about said topic, but this post is not about my gutter mouth. It just highlights it. Sorry about that… only, not.
This is a long post. I warned you. But it’s not quite what you think.
So Jimmy Moore’s annual Low-Carb Cruise has ended for the year. This year’s was spiced up a bit by Dr. Jack Kruse being removed from the ship after a rogue tweet on Twitter sent the FBI after him to search his cabin, himself and his belongings and, spooked by the whole exchange (or for whatever reason), the ship’s captain asked Dr. Kruse to leave. I am not going to get into all that here; I expressed my opinion on my Facebook page and you may sum up said opinion as “Dr. Kruse was set up and there are some serious assholes in the Paleo community.” Until some contingent of militant vegans steps forward and takes responsibility, that’s where I’ll stay, but I have yet to see him butt heads with militant vegans so I rather doubt that’s the case.
It’s a shame, too, because some people will look at how some unknown person or persons in the Paleo community have behaved and will decide to distance themselves from Paleo as a result. I at least can say I am not that petty or easily misled; there have only been a couple times in my life that I have allowed individuals to scare me away from an institution. Now you know why I am neither Catholic nor Republican–and yes, there are decent people in both demographics, but they don’t balance out the scary in my book. Nor, in my opinion, are they fighting the scary hard enough. I don’t think the Paleo community has gotten to that level of scary. Even if they did, I don’t have to be in their fucking community to follow some version of their diet. So that’s why I’m close to Paleo now even if I will never be Catholic or Republican. Between the lack of rice, the weird non-religion (I’m agnostic, if you’re curious) and the wrong politics, I figure I will never be welcome Back Home again.
OK, I’m babbling about all that a bit more than I’d intended. Sorry.
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For those who haven’t heard this already, which hopefully is at least one of you reading this, my highest known weight (since I’ve had a scale) was around 249.5. I say “around” not because I can’t remember but because at that time I wasn’t following the weigh-in protocol I’m following now: first thing in the morning, take a pee, strip down to undies and bra and socks and then weigh in. So I don’t actually know for sure that I was 249 and a half. But I was definitely close to it; no one at my height (5’6″ or 5’7″) and gender should weigh that much in clothes unless the clothes are a medieval European suit of armor. If you do, something ain’t kosher in the land of Denmark.
Accordingly, the effort to lose. The one I keep starting and stopping. I believe, though I’m still in the process of digging up all my old weigh-in photos, that I hit that high point (and low point) in 2009.
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LOOK!
 8 May 2012 at 199 pounds I don’t know that this is permanent. I imagine I’ll go back and forth for a little while. I’ll be real happy when I get down far enough that I don’t go up over 200 anymore, but I’m pretty sure I’m not there yet.
I’m just happy I finally caught it on camera. Was starting to wonder if I’d imagined it all.
I’m posting this a day late (though I took it yesterday) and will explain why in a minute.
 5 May 2012 at 200.5 pounds OMG FRUSTRATED. This past week I stepped on the scale on a whim (I think that was Thursday?) and discovered, to my delight, a weight number beginning with 1 for the first time since my daughter was a newborn. I had been at around 180 when I got pregnant with her (or so I’m guessing since that was the weight I settled in at after I had had my son, though I’d gotten down to 160ish in the six months after losing him–amazing what stress plus poverty will do to you), and had gotten back to 180 in the few days immediately after her birth (so said the hospital scale), but by the time I’d gone in for my six-week postpartum I was up to 210. WTF? I said. Is it my thyroid? My Medicaid-paid doctor ran a TSH, it came back in normal range, and no one cared to inquire further.
So seeing that on the scale was fun. Yet when I let the scale rest for several minutes and came back with my camera, the scale decided I was half a pound heavier. Back into 200s. ACK.
It’s been like that for the rest of the week. I are sad. I know I will get back to Onederland but it’s still hard.
OK. Now for the reason I didn’t post. I was tired after a long day that started with this:
 President Obama at opening rally for re-election campaign, Columbus, Ohio, 5 May 2012 I’ve been lukewarm about that whole thing and I still don’t see him as the nation’s savior–that happy task falls to you and me, as American citizens in a supposed democracy–but hearing people boo the assholes who want to loot and gut this country even further than they already have, did my heart a world of good. What would do me even more good is if all the people bitching about taxes in this country which has an amazingly low effective income-tax rate compared to other developed Western countries would wake the fuck up and ask why it’s not OK to tax us, but it’s perfectly OK to kill our jobs and cut our wages and destroy our infrastructure. You want theft of income? Try not having a fucking job because Romney bought your employer and tore it apart for his own personal profit. You want that running the entire country? I wish you the best of luck. If the GOP really wanted Obama gone they should have nominated someone who wasn’t a crazy thieving asshole. Or just crazy. (I don’t like Ron Paul either. He doesn’t see women as human beings who deserve liberty.)
So there you go. My little bit of stumping for the campaign. You’re welcome, Mister President.
I’ve been going through a bit of a thing lately. I know the mental and emotional reasons for it and I think I also know the physical reasons, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But it’s a thing. And I’ve been going through it. It’s not as bad as the various times where my ex-in-laws were fucking with me or I thought they were fucking with me, but it still dredges up all sorts of unpleasant thoughts I think about my life situation which simmer beneath the surface and bubble up to haunt me every now and again.
The good news is, I know now that at least one guy out there in the world, who isn’t the other adult living in my house, has been interested enough to contact me and want to meet with me for a friendly cup of coffee. After a multiple-year dry spell, this is tremendous in a way that most of you probably don’t understand. But there’s still the bad news that I go round with a chip on my shoulder because it took me fifteen years to thoroughly fuck up my life (I had help, mind you) and I guess on some level I am expecting to fix it all up overnight.
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Let me tell you about the week I’ve had…
 28 April 2012 at 202.5 pounds You know how I got all fucking pious last weekend about possibly dumping dairy?
Okay.
Monday night, I think it was, I decided to make shirataki spaghetti because the ingredients were there and I couldn’t think of anything better to do that both my kid and I would eat. This is no small consideration. We live in an area of town with a high vegetarian population and that’s what she hears all the time. Kids are little sponges and she might have soaked this up from the media anyway even if we weren’t constantly running into self-righteous hippies with kale stuck between their teeth. Be that as it may. So it takes some effort to get her to eat meat, and some more effort still to get her to eat meat that she believes to contain fat. We have explained to her about how there is fat in butter and cream, which she will consume with little to no hesitation, and it doesn’t matter. But include fat with her meat and it’s World War Three at the dinner table. So you can imagine my delight when she ate her dinner on Monday night. And it’d been so long since I’d had cheese that I helped myself to some from the shaky can.
This was the first I’d had nightshades since I started this whole crazy experiment. Between the cheese and the tomato sauce, I’m not sure which hit me.
The next day I woke with a headache that did not get better with lounging around moaning and hiding my eyes from the light. Sleeping it off was out of the question even if I hadn’t been home alone with my daughter. I had to get up and pace the floor before the pain let up at all. (WTF?) And then my stomach got upset. Really upset. Throwing a little snit and flailing its nonexistent arms and drumming its imaginary feet someplace unpleasant because there were still about two and a half feet or so between it and the floor, ow. I spent some time in the bathroom bent over the trash can because I was worried about my other end.
I haven’t done that since I was married. Which should say something about the state of my marriage, and further elucidate why it no longer exists.
For all I know, it was neither food. We’ve had some yucky weather and fronts this week. I haven’t felt right since Tuesday morning, though I haven’t had a headache again. I get to feeling physically not-right when we get a lot of bad weather–though, honestly, this could be a lot worse. I mean, it’s spring. We’ve had it pretty mild even with the rain. One big loud crashy-bangy thing Tuesday night or so that woke both me and Thea, and just rain otherwise.
So, jury’s still way the hell out, and did I mention I’m fed up with being a walking chemistry experiment? People have been watching me go through this for years. It’s less un-fun now than it was eight years ago, but it’s still no picnic.
I want to get some butterbur this pay period, and possibly also that chelated multi-mineral I’ve had my eyes on for a while, just to see what happens. Worst-case scenario, nothing does.
Hmmm.
 21 April 2012 at 201 pounds I had mentioned that reintroducing heavy cream might be a problem. I’ve gone back and forth with it this week because I wasn’t quite ready to let go of it yet. But now I think I need to give it a week cream-free just to see how things will turn out next Saturday. I ought to be dropping 1-2 pounds a week right now–my carb intake isn’t that high.
I think I’ll give it that week, and if I start losing again I’ll introduce ghee and try that the following week. If the ghee’s OK, then great, at least I’ll know I can handle dairyfat. If it’s not, then I’ll scream and whine and cry a lot and then declare dairy verboten, probably for good, or at least til I get down to something like a reasonable weight. And then only for planned cheats.
Now don’t take this to mean I’m going to tell everyone to shitcan dairy, because I won’t. I already have found evidence that I don’t respond to gluten well, and it’s not uncommon for someone with gluten sensitivity to respond badly to casein (a dairy protein) also. It’s sounding like the gluten sensitivity paves the way for the casein sensitivity, though I doubt anyone knows for sure. Be that as it may, it’s an issue for some people. Doesn’t mean everyone fares badly. Your mileage may vary.
I still think dairy’s a useful source of ruminant fat in an age in which “low in saturated fat” is considered a selling point for sustainable beef, and cattle are slaughtered younger than they’d have been hunted back in the Paleolithic. So if you can, go for it. If not, though, you gotta ask yourself which is more important: keeping this one food category in your diet, or improving your health?
That’s the question I’m facing, and I know how I’m answering it.
This gets a bit personal so if talking about body parts bothers you, you might want to skip this post. I don’t just talk about body parts, though, so tough it out if you want. The other stuff is further down the page.
Anyway…
I’m happy that the weight loss has got something to show for it, but I’m a bit bummed at the same time.
I think my boobs are going to disappear. 
One fun thing about being overweight has been the ownership of a rack. It hasn’t been the world’s nicest rack or anything, but at least it looked OK in clothes.
I didn’t have boobs worth speaking of back when I was slender–the shape was OK, I guess, but they were hardly there. (Weirdly, I was sized at a 32C. Where was the C part, under my armpits???) Rumor had it that at least one ex referred to me as a “boobless wonder.” I couldn’t buy matched outfit sets because either the bottoms were too small or the tops were too large. That kind of fun.
Now it looks like I’m going back to that again. And of course this time around, after two kids and a weight gain of over a hundred pounds, they’ll be all deflated and saggy and pointing at the floor, too.
Anyway, so, the situation with bras. I had gone without them for a long time because I didn’t see the point–it wasn’t like anybody was looking at me anyway. Back in ’10 when Asshole Ex got in touch with me and I suddenly started caring about my appearance, I finally bought some bras, about a size 44. Early this year it was becoming obvious that those bras weren’t cutting it–I was falling out of them. Some of that was their age, but some of it was that my band size had just shrunk. So, 42s. And now, not six months later, it looks like I’ve graduated down to at least a 40.
I have to stick with sports bras because the ones with cups are weird. My left boob is bigger than my right, so the right one kind of gets lost in a cup size that would fit the left. MAN I hate that. But I’m holding out against getting real bras til I get down to a real size. I don’t know where I will end up, so I get bras that don’t have a cup size, so that everything averages out. Plus, they are more comfy. I hate underwires and I don’t know that I would ever buy one again.
(In fact, one of my planned end-of-weight-loss rewards is a bit of a shopping spree here. They will even adjust my cup sizes!)
It’s also looking like this will be the second time in twelve months that I’ve had to size down on underwear. I think I mentioned on the latest photo progress post that mine sticks out too much in the back. That’s generally a good sign they’re getting too big. Man, I hate all the wardrobe changes. If I don’t watch it, they will get expensive.
Right now I seem to overall be a size 18, more or less. Except I have one pair of size 16 (W) jeans in the closet because I can get them on, button them, and zip them. Or I could before I washed them. Point is, they’ll fit soon. Yes, boys and girls: I own a pair of skinny(er) jeans!
I’m not keeping fat pants around though. I want getting fatter to hurt, not be easy. Just my thing, nobody else has to agree with it, and I won’t judge you either way.
OK, now for the non-body-parts-related stuff.
So I’ve reintroduced the heavy cream, and I’m not sure about it yet. It’s very subtle, but I seem to have taken on a little bit of water retention. And I have a tendency to this anyway. But my fingers have filled out a little bit and my right foot has swollen a little. And they weren’t doing that before I reintro’d the cream.
I could dismiss it as a weather front kind of thing–I get headaches sometimes when those come through, and sometimes I get joint pain, and I think sometimes I get edema. And that could still be the problem, I don’t know.
I could also blame hormones, except Aunt Flo has just visited (sorry, there go the body bits again), and this is the point in my cycle where I should have LESS retention, not more.
So I thought I’d give it a couple days on the coconut milk again and see if there is any difference. Edema has been the bane of my existence off and on since my left foot swelled mysteriously at age eighteen. If I find there are foods that trigger it, it’s time to shitcan them, much as I hate to say so.
But if it turns out cream does do this to me, I will try ghee before I give up. I at least want to keep butter in my diet, even if it has to be clarified.
So there you go. Life in my world right now…
[edit] Oh, one other thing I’m noticing this week. Back to body parts again for a bit. I don’t know why, but occasionally I get this red angry spot in my left armpit. It looks for all the world like a yeast infection. But I only get it on the left side.
Well, I hadn’t had it in a while, and had pretty much forgotten about them. But this week it’s turning up again.
So I’m suspicious it could be a dairy reaction. The usual reasons I’d assumed that it was showing up have not been in play this time around. So what I will probably do is go without cream the rest of the week, then try to start it again this Sunday and see what happens. If the rash comes back, I’ll know.
Yeah, my body, being weird. Completely unusual.
I haven’t done a set like this since the New Year, and didn’t really see the point because five pounds won’t look like a lot.
Well, at my weight, fifteen pounds doesn’t look like a lot either, but 200 is a milestone, so what the hell.
By the way, I think I’m shrinking out of my underwear. It was sticking up out the back of my shorts and I had to reshoot the side-view photos. D’oh! And they’re bright red today. There is NO missing them.
 14 April 2012, frontal view, abs relaxed |
 14 April 2012, frontal view, gut sucked in |
 14 April 2012, profile view, abs relaxed |
 14 April 2012, profile view, gut sucked in |
 14 April 2012, upper arm and shoulder |
 14 April 2012, face, frontal view |
 14 April 2012, face, profile view |
 14 April 2012, legs, frontal view |
 14 April 2012, back view |
For comparison’s sake, here’s the first set of pictures. (Scroll down.)
I apologize that everything’s not at the exact same angle as it was last time. I’m doing this all by myself, and I’d have to mark things with tape and then leave them up half the year before I could aim and pose properly. Also, I had a real tripod this time. Also, my Samsung is a bitch and didn’t want to focus properly on some of the shots, but I kept them anyway because (1) I already had to do some shots twice thanks to the Red Flag Undies Incident; and (2) they don’t need to be razor-sharp for you to tell what they’re portraying.
I’m seeing some smoothing out on my legs though. They were a lot more cottage-cheese-like the last time around, and this time the line is much more graceful–if you could ever use the word “graceful” to describe my derpy-assed, knock-kneed so-called legs. I didn’t like them when I was slender, either. They have not improved at all.
I see bat-wing surgery in my future for the upper arms, though. And no matter how brave you might think I am for doing this photo series, I am not pulling down my shorts in front to show you how bad the gut is. I’m pretty sure you figured that out from the contours, anyway. Ew. That’s another one that’d go under the knife if I really wanted to be vain enough. Not now, of course. Later, when I’m at a reasonable weight for it and maintain that weight for long enough. If it doesn’t go away on its own. I’ve seen some encouraging signs so far, but I also have about a million stretch marks in that area. You should have seen me in my first pregnancy: I had tiger stripes on my belly! So… yeah. That’s probably never going to be pretty. Sorry to say.
And those shorts are getting fucking baggy. It’ll be fun trying to do another set 20 pounds from now. I suppose I could try lycra bicycle shorts next…
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