Primal With A Side Of FABULOUS page 22

[Gay Panda]

Ah, but that's not a mentor! You need to fire your Drill Sergeant and get yourself a true mentor (much like Lady Friend)!

Maybe I just respond best to tough love. That swim coach never fell to insults, she just lived by the hard press (expressed in heavily accented shouts that could be heard from every point in the Olympic-size pool we swam in). You don't like what to see? Then change it. No excuses, Gay Panda!

Lady Friend is much more of a mentor, but even she has the Stern Voice, which she has used on me effectively many times.

[ottercat]

Ancient Chinese Secret: Dandelion supplements!
It's labeled as a diuretic, but apparently it does this by correcting potassium deficiency (?). I think if you aren't getting all your veggies, excess sodium (i.e. all restaurant food) could throw off your potassium balance. Or maybe I just made that up. Either way, it works for me. I take the caps because making tea sounds like a bother.

[Gay Panda]

Ancient Chinese Secret: Dandelion supplements!
It's labeled as a diuretic, but apparently it does this by correcting potassium deficiency (?). I think if you aren't getting all your veggies, excess sodium (i.e. all restaurant food) could throw off your potassium balance. Or maybe I just made that up. Either way, it works for me. I take the caps because making tea sounds like a bother.

That is good to know, ottercat. And if you are making it up, at least you made me laugh when I read it.

[Gay Panda]

One day, I might be normal. It is odd to type that. When you’ve been spent years fighting and fighting your fat, and losing one battle after another, it feels so hopeless. I took diet pills and failed. I restricted calories and failed. I exercised and failed. I did Weight Watchers and failed. My doctor said to exercise more. My nutrition teacher blamed fast food. Yet I was running 5Ks and didn’t eat fast food. So I failed and failed and failed, and felt like I was trying to fill a bucket when there was a hole in the bottom. It could not be done. I was never going to see a normal weight again.

It is an actual possibility with primal that one day, I might no longer be overweight. This blows my mind. My whole adult life has been swaddled in fat, which affected the stores in which I shopped and the way I carried myself. At 231, I worried that I would collapse chairs. The other day, I looked at a porch swing thinking that I might be too heavy, before I remembered that my body is no longer 231, or 217, or over 200 at all.

I am 189.8 today, which floors me. I am a mixture of emotions, from elation to regret that I spent all these years being fat and fighting fat and losing, when there was a simple solution all along. I did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I did well in school. I went to a ritzy college where insecure pandas like myself go to prove that they are smarter than everyone else. (And then they graduate $25,000 in debt and realized the kids who knocked off two years at a JC before finishing at a state school were smarter all along.) Yet I, for all my smartness, swallowed whole the conventional wisdom of how to lose weight, tortured myself with it for years, and never questioned that that wisdom might be wrong.

The day that I come in at a normal weight, I want to buy a ticket to Wisconsin. My friend owns a costume store for people who dress up for Renaissance Fairs and re-enactments. Gay Panda does neither of these things, but likes to run panda paws over the clothes and dress up in them for five minutes. The last time that I was in that store, I couldn’t fit into the best outfits. I wasn’t trying to squash myself into anything petite either. It circled so many sad faces on my feelings charts. To run my paws over some silken item with sparkling buttons and think I’m too fat for this broke my heart.

But one day, I might not be fat, and I can goof around swinging a cutlass in a pirate outfit, transform into a soldier or Robin Hood or Maid Marian or the dark-cloaked grumpy teenaged Goth Panda who will forever sulk in my heart. It may seem like a silly dream, but I feel like I missed out on so much play. Being fat in young adulthood made me self-conscious, less likely to put myself forward, and more likely to settle. I believed that I couldn’t do any better.

My reality since age 19 has been obesity. The GERD was excruciating. My knees ached so badly that I didn’t want to walk. The pulsatile tinnitus (which is objective, not subjective like the ringing kind) at one point reached such an extreme level that my doctor could put her head by mine and hear it. There is not one thing fabulous about being fat, in pain, and hearing all day and all night the WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH of your pulse over other people’s voices.

189.8. Maybe next year, I’ll post my pirate picture here. One day, I might actually be free of this fat.

[Debdoub]

I 'd go to the Ren Faire but more for the guys in kilts. Some of those bad boys could take a side of primal, though, just like me. Guess I should have dressed up and flirted after all.

You are doing a great job getting there!

[csgmoore]

I like Cadbury Eggs and curly fries, Mystery Science Theater and Doctor Who, celebrity gossip and PS3 Lego games.

Was just watching Doctor Who while eating lunch. What do you think of Moffat versus T.Davies? Matt Smith? And Torchwood? Thought Miracle Day not as good as Children of the Earth.

[PixieKitten]

Sorry, jumping in here.
Matt smith is cool. He makes unfashionable items cool.
I thought Miracle Day was better than Children of the Earth, but that might be because I can't really remember much of Children of the Earth.
And John Barrowman... WHY must you be GAY?? All the ladies who will have even less of a chance... me included xD
Lucky Gay Panda. =D

*Steps down from 'you Panda, Ima let you finish and all but-' Podium and retreats to her fridge for bacon*

[robotunicr0n]

Refreshing to find someone that actually writes in their journal as opposed to just journaling in their journal. While I didn't have some of the same issues you mention I do sympathize with the sentiments that you have shared. You put your words very elegantly. I too have run my hands/claws/paws (depending on the day) over smoothy silky fun stuff wishing I could wear it but not being able to. One time specifically came to mind while I was in the Czech Republic trying to find a button up shirt that fit me :/ I saw all of these beautiful and not very expensive button ups that claimed to be XL but didn't even come close to fitting my broad shoulders and my fat belly. And even now, at this point, I haven't lost weight since starting being Primal, only gained it. Mostly because I've been pretty bad at staying on board.

[Gay Panda]

Was just watching Doctor Who while eating lunch. What do you think of Moffat versus T.Davies? Matt Smith? And Torchwood? Thought Miracle Day not as good as Children of the Earth.

I preferred the ninth doctor to the tenth, and preferred the tenth to the eleventh, but I must say that the eleventh's obsession with the fez made me weep with laughter like nothing else ever has on the show. I think that he's growing into the part more slowly where it seemed like the 9th and 10th just embodied it at once, at least for me. But I also far prefer the 11th doctor to the first. Lady Friend and I are watching the first on fast forward. Is there a doctor who you prefer? I also liked the storyline better under Davies.

Although I initially enjoyed Torchwood, it became so depressing that I stopped watching. I might pick it up again sometime.

[Gay Panda]

Sorry, jumping in here.
Matt smith is cool. He makes unfashionable items cool.
I thought Miracle Day was better than Children of the Earth, but that might be because I can't really remember much of Children of the Earth.
And John Barrowman... WHY must you be GAY?? All the ladies who will have even less of a chance... me included xD
Lucky Gay Panda. =D

THE FEZ!!! Gay Panda loves that stupid fez.

As to Gay Panda being lucky that John Barrowman is gay . . . you do not know if Gay Panda is a Gay Gentleman Panda or a Gay Lady Panda. If the former, Gay Panda is indeed lucky, and has a shrine to him with candles kept burning twenty-four hours a day. If the latter, Gay Panda appreciates his beauty but does not comprehend the attraction.