September 24, 2012

Report from an outlier

It's just that all around me, people are: Eating.Carbs.Constantly.
It does not stop. Ever.

They are trying to eat in a way they have been told is "healthy." No meat, no fat, lotsa healthy whole grains.

So I observe this perpetual intake of whole grain cereal with fruit and skim milk;  nonfat yogurt containing lots of sugar with whole wheat toast, no butter but a dollop of jam; pretzels and snack mix and crackers and cookies and granola.

They cannot stop. They joke about it, "they walk it off" at lunch, they occasionally wonder about it. But they are told this is the healthy way to eat. They struggle against the screaming hunger... and then succumb to it.

Because they are "only" ten or twenty pounds overweight. Everyone around them is doing the same thing. They are considered Normal.

However, I never had that cushion. I was, on the exact same eating pattern, thirty and forty and fifty pounds overweight. I never had the luxury of laughing off a few extra pounds and a dress size higher than I wanted to be. My overweight status was always an emergency; a ridiculed, can't-find-jeans, stupid-fat-pig kind of emergency.

I couldn't overlook it, and be like everyone else. I was tormented by the fact that, as far as I could tell, I ate like everyone else, but I sure didn't look like anyone else.

It is a state of perpetual hunger. The only difference is that other people feed their perpetual hunger, and only put on a nominal, norm-adjusted, amount of overweight that is considered almost inevitable for their age group.

However, myself, and those like me, react in an entirely different way. We blow up like party balloons.

But this healthy advice wasn't satisfied with insult; I also got injury. If I did the same thing my peers did, upping my activity and lowering my calories, they dropped those few extra pounds. So did I; except I never got to an "acceptable" weight the way they did. I stayed overweight unless I starved myself. So I did.

Until I couldn't, any more.

Without eating low carb, and now, Paleo, I would now be over a hundred pounds overweight. I would have diabetes, high blood pressure, rampant arthritis, and rotten, rotten, moods.

How do I know this? The same way I have known for decades. I simply look around at the people who are my own age.

The difference is: I no longer eat the same way they do.