Primal With A Side Of FABULOUS page 102

[Gay Panda]

UPDATE: (in explanation of *)

* Sunrise being rescheduled for 9 since Gay Panda slept in.

[Gay Panda]

Round Two of High Fat

Monday: 185.2
Tuesday: 184.4
Wednesday: 183.4
Thursday: 183.2
Friday: Q

That is all.

Oh, who am I kidding? When have I ever passed up the chance to natter in print? I'm up to 184.0 this morning, a water spike for no apparent reason. I'll stick to High Fat for the weekend in the interest of Panda Science, and we'll see if the water spike goes away and I continue losing. Whatever, 184! You're just not that intimidating, not when I used to be 231. Sweet Valhalla, I used to lug about 47 extra pounds of panda.

[Gay Panda]

PART ONE: Pop Quiz, children: On the day that I stood upon my scale and saw 231 pounds of panda, which of the following was my first thought?

A: OMFG! WTF? I know that I’m not my college weight of 137 any longer, but 231?!
B: Uh-oh. That seems a little high. Better skip food for the next decade.
C: My scale must be broken.

If you guessed C, give yourself a Panda Pat. Yes, my first thought was that the scale was wrong. It was a very old scale after all. The footpads were yellow with age and the scale’s capabilities were nothing fancy. It just gave the number. I weighed a second time, confident that the first read-out had been an error. But for a second time, it gave me 231.

Was it sure? I weighed a third time. 231. I was stunned. Days before, I’d joined a gym and taken a training on treadmill operation from a Plucky Young Thing. The treadmill display prompted me to design my workout (up to 60 minutes) and speed (oh, 3 seems nice), and then demanded that I reveal my weight. But I did not know, having not weighed myself in a long time, and I was very aware that I had a Plucky Young Thing beside me, waiting expectantly. I neither wanted to confess to the machine nor the Plucky Young Thing what was screamingly obvious: I weighed Q.

The treadmill had no Q key.

“I honestly have no idea what I weigh,” I confessed.
“You still have to enter a number,” said the Plucky Young Thing. I knew that long ago I had been 207, but having to type this in before another person made me writhe internally. I wanted to hunch over the display so that the Plucky Young Thing would not see the numbers, but that would look weird. And so, being prompted again, I typed in 200. Dear Valhalla. Why was I 25 years old and already shopping in fat stores? Weren’t my twenties supposed to be the prime of my life? The Perpetually Arguing Panda Parents were fat, but that happened in their forties! But I would fix this. I would go to the gym every single day and transform Fat Panda to Regular Panda.

[Gay Panda]

PART TWO: It bothered me over the next few days that I was entering 200 into the treadmill when I had no idea if that were accurate. That was how the scale and I found each other again after a long separation. Maybe I was overshooting! I might only be 195! Then it revealed that not only was I not 200 or 207, I’d actually left those numbers behind. 231. I could not conceive of this number in relation to myself. I fled to the gym and churned out miles on the treadmill, the inward scream of SAVE ME trailing behind my footsteps, certain that this was the solution to losing my excess. And it was, at least for some of it. So was calorie restriction. But I reached a point where I could go no further, and I was still heavy.

Yesterday I drove past the most miserable jogger alive, grinding out miles with sweat circles under her arms, grimness and exhaustion on her face. Her T-shirt hugged a bulging belly; her eyes were only half-open; her jog was more of a weary trudge. I must have looked like that. I couldn’t ever outrun my fat. The amount of sweat testified that she was trying to do the same. She probably went home, showered, had a smoothie, and collapsed. The next time she weighs, she may be disappointed that the misery she endured on the road did not translate to a jump for joy in her bathroom.

I never loved exercise for exercise. I exercised because I believed that it would refashion me from flub to fab. But it did not, and I felt so betrayed by my body. I wish that I’d known that this was normal. I ran for years thinking that I was not losing weight because I was not running enough, and my body finally quit on me. And now I am 184 without starving and running myself to a sweaty, miserable mess, upsetting my knees, and tweaking this, that, and there, too. But it’s left a mark; I loathe exercise after so many years of associating it with defeat on the scale and pain in my body.

So I am pleased to find myself looking forward to another round of miniature golf in San Diego. I don’t like movement in general; Gay Panda is perfectly happy to sit at a laptop writing from morning to night. But I am also happy to putter around windmills with my golf club covered in swine flu, and maybe I will try a batting cage since I always wanted to as a cub and never did. For now, exercise has to be play or I just won’t do it. And I have to separate exercise/play from the goal of weight loss, and those have been entwined in my mind for a very long time. I don’t know when I lost the mindset of recess, but I want it back.

Watch out, Boomers! Gay Panda has no idea where you are in San Diego, but GPS does, and I’m coming to be immature on your golf course and in your batting cage and for a spin on a Go-Kart. None of this is primal, but for Gay Panda, it’s a (don’t think of how many calories burned) step in the right direction.

[ottercat]

I wrote 190. After all, I’d zoomed past 190 on my Antidepressant Rocketship Adventure Ride. It was true in the past, and if ever I gained the ability to control time, it could be true again! 190. That’s not as scary as 200 (or the truth that I was even higher than that). 190 meant that I had a problem, yet somehow it wasn’t as daunting. After all, 190 is so close to 189, and the 180s aren’t too freaky. The 180s snuggle next to the 170s, and the 170s are neighbors with the 160s where lies the top range of what I should be. So 190 it was!

Ha ha! I totally lied on my driver's license a few years ago. It was before the wedding and my weight would not go below 122 even though I was eating salad for lunch, skating 9 hours a week and training for a half marathon with a friend (no time for weights). I finally decided that it was because my driver's license said I weighed "125" so in desperation I invoked Otter voodoo and told the lady I weighed "115". My weight went the other way. I finally, reliably back into the 120's and then I lost my driver's license so on the new one I said I weighed 125. Can't wait until I pass that by.

[Gay Panda]

Round Two of High Fat

Monday: 185.2
Tuesday: 184.4
Wednesday: 183.4
Thursday: 183.2
Friday: Q
Saturday: Q

Oh, water spike. Was it something I said? I'm sorry. Would you please leave? Gay Panda tires of your company.

[Gay Panda]

Round Two of High Fat

Monday: 185.2
Tuesday: 184.4
Wednesday: 183.4
Thursday: 183.2
Friday: Q
Saturday: Q
Sunday: 183.2

So we meet again, 183.2. And the scale wavered between you and 183 flat. Gay Panda is going to do the panda best to make this another icky High Fat Day. I've spent the morning reading about A: how Lindsay Lohan's Playboy cover isn't selling; B: families not celebrating Christmas because the economy is circling sad faces on feelings charts; C: if Angelina Jolie plagiarized the script of her latest movie; and D: gluconeogenesis. Then I spent time on lean body mass calculators and multiplying by 0.5 in curiosity that perhaps this sedentary panda eats too much protein, but what I don't know about biochemistry could fill a canyon and spill over the top.

My trolls have been eradicated by the hostile world of MDA, leaving me last night to mindless Netflix streaming instead of love letters. I miss you, trolls. People just didn't understand. But Gay Panda did. Come back, duckies, and let me wax eloquent upon the music in my heart.

[Gay Panda]

I am going to jinx myself with this post.

Despite my OCD decontamination rituals, for most of my life I have caught every cootie going by on the Freight Train of Ick. I was besieged with ear infections as a very young cub, one after another, and I still remember the heat and crust and itch within my canals, the thick ooze of the pink medicine in a fat-lipped green measuring tube. Later, if anything was going around my school, I brought it home to share. This went on through all twelve grades and college, and then it grew worse when I started teaching. By the second week of September, I was sick. I’d be sick again in October and November, and then in January and February and April and July. There was no choice but to work through the illnesses as the year progressed; I was out of sick time and rent doesn’t stop being due. It became so bad that I turned down dinner invitations from friends on the tail side of their colds. They weren’t even supposed to be contagious any longer, but two days after their visit, my throat would start to ache.

Being ill turns Gay Panda into a Q-sized, whiny baby. Nobody likes Q-sized, whiny babies so I am only one on the inside. But I feel terribly sorry for myself and make the most ear-piercing protestations in my mind; I begrudge other people their health and wish they were as miserable as I am. I think terrible things about the person who infected me, and I hope that the world ends so that I don’t have to live this way any longer. Yes, Gay Panda hopes that seven billion people go down in an apocalypse with me, because that is how much Gay Panda hates being ill*. If Gay Panda had a time machine when sick, it would go all the way back to the first puddle of primordial ooze where I would stomp in it until I made sure that the components of life never formed. And then billions of years later, Gay Panda would not have a head cold! Genius!**

Since changing how I eat, I have not gotten sick. Not once, not even a hint of it. I can’t think of the last time I went from March to December with no instance of illness. Of course, I don’t teach any longer, and I still avoid friends who are getting over cooties. But this never stopped me before from getting ill over and over and over, taking someone’s week-long illness and refashioning it into a month-long illness for myself. And then catching a new one while I was still in the Last Sniffle Stage of the one preceding it! My only incident of unpleasantness since March was my stomach hitting its EJECT button on coconut oil.

I have not sniffled. I have not coughed. I have not swallowed over the beginning of a rasp. Have I been incredibly lucky? Is there a connection between how my diet once was and an immune system permanently on sabbatical? I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I only know my body, and my body has not gotten sick in record time.

And now I’ve jinxed it. I’ll be sick by Wednesday.

[Gay Panda]

UPDATE: (in explanation of * and **)

* Sometimes when I was ill, looking darkly at the wall and hating the world and everyone in it, Lady Friend would ask what I was thinking. I would shout, “YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW.”

** We will ignore the paradox that this creates.

[Gay Panda]

Round Two of High Fat

Last Monday: 185.2
This Monday: 182.6

Gay Panda is giddy. I will continue the Ick of High Fat since my body seems to like it, and my body also appears to like somewhat lower protein than what I was giving it before. I don't really want to write down every single thing that I eat and be counting protein/fat grams, but I can't argue with one of the biggest mostly-not-water drops in a week I've ever made. So we will continue on the 69%-73% Fat Train.

I might actually reach 179.8 one day. Jaw. Floor.