I can't say when. I never ballooned. It's taken me thirty years to put on the weight that I have. I remember noticing the double chin for the first time... remember being shocked at a photo that showed me with a belly. I remember realizing I had to buy old-lady underwear for the first time. I wanted to lose weight, but doubted I could.
My mother told me I was fat when I was 19 and weighed 120, and you believe your mother. Now, at age 51, I look at pictures of myself then and want to cry. I knew I was ugly; it had been ingrained into me. But I was beautiful.
I tend to fat, I guess, due to several factors:
- Genetics: my mother tended to fat, my father didn't. My sister was blessed with my father's fat gene and has been slender all her life. I, on the other hand, was blessed with my mother's. (Oh, incidentally: she was always "slimming". But never, as far as I could tell, lost an ounce while she was healthy.)
- Sedentary work: I'm a writer. It also does not help that I hate walking. My exercise of choice is swimming, and because I hate chlorine I tend to do it in the nearest lake, so it's only during summer.
- Comfort eating: I find eating settles nervousness.
- Carbohydrate cravings due to being an ugly fat useless slob of a person, just as my mother always told me. Or is that why? More on this later.
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Previous attempts
I tried once when I was in my twenties. I was about 160 lbs and wanted to drop to 140. I did it by simply cutting down portions. Some success, but it was such hell I could not continue, so put whatever I lost back on and then some.
I tried again with the Carbohydrate Addicts diet in my early thirties. Their literature convinced me that I was a carb addict. The basic method of this diet is that you eat absolutely minimal carbs for 23 hours of the day, and whatever you want in the one remaining hour. Again, some success... if I recall rightly, I dropped about 20 pounds... but it was agony, so I quit and put it all back on, and then some.
My third attempt was in late 2008 and early 2009, and again, I just cut back, eating the same things I always ate but in lesser amounts. Again, success. I stay off weigh scales as a rule, but by the mirror and by the way my clothes fit (e.g., pants falling down if I didn't use a belt), I'll guess I lost about 30 lbs. Okay, I have another measure. It is whether I can see my pubic hair while I'm lying in the bath. (I'm like a man, putting it on on my tummy.) I could again, easily.
But then I began a killer writing schedule, producing this. I started Mar. 17, 2009, and since then have posted about 1.6 million words on there, and, if I may so myself, good ones. That's about 16 average-length novels. (If you like character-driven, gritty, realistic fantasy with lots of sword fights, give it a try.) It was stressful, and at first made me nervous. I fell off the wagon, put all the weight back on. And then some. Farewell again to my pubic hair. At that point I decided dieting was impossible, and essentially gave up.
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Melissa, Landmark and Ideal Protein
My best friend Melissa Gold first introduced me to Landmark Education in 2006, when I took the first course. I've taken more courses since and had great results, which is a whole other story. Joining a volunteer team to help facilitate my favourite of them allowed me to burrow further into the Landmark community. In the meantime, Melissa, who had been part of it much longer, was hearing that many Landmark people were trying, and having great success with, losing weight through something called the Ideal Protein Diet. She and her husband Marv decided in late 2011.
Now if you go on the Ideal Protein website, you'll have the typical reaction. "A weight loss program that really works!" (Yeah right.) "Your last diet." (Uhhhh huh.) "Supports vitality and energy" (They all say that.) "I lost 53 lbs. in 90 days!" (I saw you in a supermarket tabloid.) Go through the testimonials, which are full of before-and-after pictures, and they are amazing, but it's natural to think that it's some kind of cheat.
However, when friends do it, and you see the results with your own eyes, you have to believe it. The first selling point that they shared with me was that they did not feel hungry on the diet. I never would have believed that on a website, which is probably why the Ideal Protein people don't put it there. Dieting without that constant gnawing feeling of deprivation? I almost said "Sign me up!" right there.
But it got better... way better. Marv lost about 50 lbs in four months, and became more svelte, Melissa told me, than he was when they married over 30 years ago. Melissa I didn't think of as needing to lose much; she looked like a woman over 60 who'd basically kept her figure. But she felt she had a big butt, partly because she is naturally pear-shaped, and talked about how, as a teenager, she'd been criticized by her father for not having "snake hips." She also constantly claimed that she not was built to be an athlete, despite her participating yearly in the Ride to Conquer Cancer, which is a 200-kilometres-in-two-days bike ride, for which, of course, you have to train up. (Drop her some dollars.)
She lost about 30 lbs. Suddenly she had the shape of a teenager--square shoulders, nice definition on her arms, tight face. "OMG, Melissa!" I said, the first time I saw her after she'd hit her goal. "You've got snake hips!" Perhaps even better, she began talking about how the diet was releasing from within her "the athlete I really feel I am."
When I look back, I realize that it was pretty much inevitable that I would try it, at that point.
That was in February, if I recall rightly. Or maybe January. I do know that it took me a while to psyche myself up. I had two main objections:
1) Making such a huge change in my eating habits. Melissa gave me a good education on what it would entail: a complete overhaul. It would also be tougher for me in a way than it had been for her and Marv, because it's just them at home and so they could purge their cupboards of all forbidden foods. (They gave them, ironically, to me.) I, on the other hand, have two teenaged sons who love their tacos and their chips and their french fries. The look and the smell of everything they eat, I cannot banish.
and
2) The price. Ideal Protein is expensive, no two ways about it. You get one-on-one coaching, so you have to pay for that. You eat their protein foods, and they cost a lot. I calculated that if I went with the same person Marv and Melissa went to, it would cost me $600 a month, unless I could find some way to do it cheaper, like making my own protein products. Plus the gas to drive down to Toronto every week or two for weigh-ins (a 2 1/2 hour drive). I'm a single mom with a mortgage, and a writer whose name you probably don't know, so you can guess my income isn't exactly in Bill Gates territory.
Nonetheless, after psyching myself for a couple of months, in which I took one Landmark Course that helped a lot, I finally phoned their coach in late March. She told me there wasn't a way I could make the foods myself.
How you find out how badly you want something: have it taken away from you. I was crushed. I hadn't known I wanted it so badly.
But I wasn't entirely crushed, because through the IP website I had found that there was an IP location in Huntsville, Ontario, the town near which I live. I gave them a call, talked to a delightful nurse named Jo-Ann. She told me that the price if I went with them was more like $450 a month. And for convenience, of course, there was no comparison. After several days more psyching, I made the first appointment for April 5, 2012.
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