A study shows that fat people who diet themselves thin and stay that way exist in a permanent state of physical and psychological starvation. Would YOU want to live like that? Well, neither do I. If you are genetically predisposed to be thin, it doesn't make you a better person than I am.
Do you think the day will come when we decide that being dark-skinned is morally superior, so everyone goes out and scorches themselves to a leathery crisp in the sunlight? And that those who are genetically predisposed to have dark skin will call pale-skinned people "weak-willed" for not wanting to fry themselves? After all, melanin has some protective qualities, so we all need to become as dark as possible, right? Yeah, right.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Never Thin Enough for the Obesity Warriors
So, they've terrorized the population into becoming practically anorexic, demonizing anyone who resists their scare tactics as weak-willed, slothful, and disgusting. They've duped the public into thinking that we're in the midst of a deadly epidemic of fat people, and that even a gram of adipose tissue will cause an untimely demise. I would have thought that they'd be satisfied with that, wouldn't you?
Since the tactic worked so well, and many people are starving and exercising themselves into a shape that is considered acceptable so that they don't have to feel like moral failures, it wasn't enough anymore. We can't have people NOT living in fear, right? Were they counting on the American people to shrug their shoulders and continue on with their "overweight" lives? Because now that eating disordered behavior is trumpted as healthy (without giving the behavior that label), inflicting an epidemic of insidious mental illness on the public, they've declared that thin people are "fat inside".
Yes, that's right, even if you are thin, you are still fat on the inside. And they aren't speaking figuratively.
Thin People May Be Fat Inside
"If it really is what's on the inside that counts, then a lot of thin people might be in trouble. Some doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas — invisible to the naked eye — could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin.
'Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat,' said Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London."
A professor of molecular imaging. Not a medical doctor, but someone who takes pictures of people's guts. No, he wouldn't have any vested interest in convincing people to get their innards unnecessarily scanned, not at all!
Look, fat is not cancerous growth. It is not abnormal. Your body produces it for a REASON. It's not just storage for times of famine. It secretes hormones, cushions and insulates the body, and generates heat to help you fight infection or keep you from hypothermia.
It's not going to be enough until they have each and every one of us on a treadmill 18 hours a day, with nothing but nasty protein bars to eat and barely-flavored, aspartame-sweetened vitamin water to drink. Fifty lashes for anyone whose body produces a fat cell! We must be a nation of neurotic skeletons, or we're all going to DIE!
Fat is the new sex. Christianity has been replaced by the Cult of Health, with similarly misguided and unreasonable dogma that forbids just about anything that generates joy and contentment. Contented and happy people are much harder to scare into submission than fearful, anxious ones. Just as condemning people for homosexuality or being liberal in the name of God has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, condemning them for being fat has nothing to do with the promotion of true health.
Enough is enough.
Since the tactic worked so well, and many people are starving and exercising themselves into a shape that is considered acceptable so that they don't have to feel like moral failures, it wasn't enough anymore. We can't have people NOT living in fear, right? Were they counting on the American people to shrug their shoulders and continue on with their "overweight" lives? Because now that eating disordered behavior is trumpted as healthy (without giving the behavior that label), inflicting an epidemic of insidious mental illness on the public, they've declared that thin people are "fat inside".
Yes, that's right, even if you are thin, you are still fat on the inside. And they aren't speaking figuratively.
Thin People May Be Fat Inside
"If it really is what's on the inside that counts, then a lot of thin people might be in trouble. Some doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas — invisible to the naked eye — could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin.
'Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat,' said Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London."
A professor of molecular imaging. Not a medical doctor, but someone who takes pictures of people's guts. No, he wouldn't have any vested interest in convincing people to get their innards unnecessarily scanned, not at all!
Look, fat is not cancerous growth. It is not abnormal. Your body produces it for a REASON. It's not just storage for times of famine. It secretes hormones, cushions and insulates the body, and generates heat to help you fight infection or keep you from hypothermia.
It's not going to be enough until they have each and every one of us on a treadmill 18 hours a day, with nothing but nasty protein bars to eat and barely-flavored, aspartame-sweetened vitamin water to drink. Fifty lashes for anyone whose body produces a fat cell! We must be a nation of neurotic skeletons, or we're all going to DIE!
Fat is the new sex. Christianity has been replaced by the Cult of Health, with similarly misguided and unreasonable dogma that forbids just about anything that generates joy and contentment. Contented and happy people are much harder to scare into submission than fearful, anxious ones. Just as condemning people for homosexuality or being liberal in the name of God has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, condemning them for being fat has nothing to do with the promotion of true health.
Enough is enough.
For those taking Levoxyl (a thyroid medication)
If you are taking the thyroid medication Levoxyl (as I am), you can get a coupon from their website for free pills:
http://www.levoxylforlife.com/
If you sign up, they'll let you print the coupon out, and you can use it to get 30 pills of any strength for free. You can use it twice more, at 90-day intervals, so that you essentially get 90 pills for free.
Every little bit helps, right?
http://www.levoxylforlife.com/
If you sign up, they'll let you print the coupon out, and you can use it to get 30 pills of any strength for free. You can use it twice more, at 90-day intervals, so that you essentially get 90 pills for free.
Every little bit helps, right?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
You can have my calories when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
I've been reading Junk Food Science quite regularly, and on the author's recommendation, I picked up "Never Too Thin: Why women are at war with their bodies". I've learned what I suspected: Much of the "conventional wisdom" about diet and weight loss is pretty much bunk, and being fat does not mean you are going to die earlier than a thin person.
I was recently thinking about the constant back-and-forth information we are receiving about food and diet at almost every minute of every day. Imagine my surprise when, probably years ago by now, "they" declared fruit juice practically poisonous because it has sugar in it. Never mind that it has vitamins and tastes good; every calorie must be squashed out of existence. Not long after, we had foul-tasting "diet" juices with aspartame. Yuck.
Soon, fruit itself was declared obscene and indulgent, because, again, it has sugar. Never mind that fruit is one of the most basic food sources for thousands upon thousands of animal species. Never mind that our bodies are well-equipped to consume and digest fruits; they contain horrible, evil calories, and they MUST BE BANNED. You'd think "they" would have been satisfied, but the most ludicrous was yet to come.
I was actually told by a nutritionist (my lame doctor from a while back made me go, for no other reason besides my vegetarianism) that I should also avoid CARROTS, because they have sugar in them! I was stunned by this idea, because it seemed that the only basis for classifying foods as good or bad seemed to be whether or not they contained calories at all! It feels like this isn't going to stop until "they" have snatched every last calorie from our mouths, leaving us to eat or drink nothing but wood chips and water (bottled, of course, as we must provide the bottled water manufacturers with income).
Can we just stop the nonsense? Animals need calories to survive. Hunger is a natural, normal thing, and I am sick to death of the foodphobia that we currently have going on in our culture. IT IS OKAY TO EAT FOOD! It is okay to enjoy food! Hunger is an unpleasant feeling; I consider it to be a type of pain. If someone told you that, to be healthy and socially acceptable, especially the socially acceptable part, you had to put rocks in your shoes and then walk a mile every day, would you do it? Or would you tell them to stop being stupid and get a life? So why do we accept advice that tells us that we must live in hunger in order to be healthy and socially acceptable? Why do we punish ourselves with unsatisfying or bad-tasting foods when we are really craving life-giving calories?
Creating polarized food groups (bad/good foods), we create an endless cycle of self-denial and self-punishment. When you eat a celery stick, but you're really craving a fresh-baked dinner roll, you aren't going to be happy with the celery. You are still going to crave the roll, and many people will go ahead and get the roll, only to be angry with themselves for their "weakness". Why have so many people allowed themselves to be programmed in this way? Why do people honestly believe that eating even basic foods like bread and fruit are moral failings?
Look, you're not in this world for very long as it is. Life should be lived and enjoyed without guilt and misery over the simplest things that harm no one. Is your eating a blueberry muffin harming anyone? No, it isn't, unless you enslaved some poor little European grandmother to bake it for you at gunpoint. Use guilt for appropriate things, like when you really did hurt someone else. Guilt is there to teach you to behave better toward other people, and it sickens me that it's been co-opted for stupid shit like having sexual thoughts (thanks, religions of the world) or enjoying even the smallest bite of food.
Eat, live, be happy. And have some guilt-free sex, too, okay? Do it for me. I command you.
I was recently thinking about the constant back-and-forth information we are receiving about food and diet at almost every minute of every day. Imagine my surprise when, probably years ago by now, "they" declared fruit juice practically poisonous because it has sugar in it. Never mind that it has vitamins and tastes good; every calorie must be squashed out of existence. Not long after, we had foul-tasting "diet" juices with aspartame. Yuck.
Soon, fruit itself was declared obscene and indulgent, because, again, it has sugar. Never mind that fruit is one of the most basic food sources for thousands upon thousands of animal species. Never mind that our bodies are well-equipped to consume and digest fruits; they contain horrible, evil calories, and they MUST BE BANNED. You'd think "they" would have been satisfied, but the most ludicrous was yet to come.
I was actually told by a nutritionist (my lame doctor from a while back made me go, for no other reason besides my vegetarianism) that I should also avoid CARROTS, because they have sugar in them! I was stunned by this idea, because it seemed that the only basis for classifying foods as good or bad seemed to be whether or not they contained calories at all! It feels like this isn't going to stop until "they" have snatched every last calorie from our mouths, leaving us to eat or drink nothing but wood chips and water (bottled, of course, as we must provide the bottled water manufacturers with income).
Can we just stop the nonsense? Animals need calories to survive. Hunger is a natural, normal thing, and I am sick to death of the foodphobia that we currently have going on in our culture. IT IS OKAY TO EAT FOOD! It is okay to enjoy food! Hunger is an unpleasant feeling; I consider it to be a type of pain. If someone told you that, to be healthy and socially acceptable, especially the socially acceptable part, you had to put rocks in your shoes and then walk a mile every day, would you do it? Or would you tell them to stop being stupid and get a life? So why do we accept advice that tells us that we must live in hunger in order to be healthy and socially acceptable? Why do we punish ourselves with unsatisfying or bad-tasting foods when we are really craving life-giving calories?
Creating polarized food groups (bad/good foods), we create an endless cycle of self-denial and self-punishment. When you eat a celery stick, but you're really craving a fresh-baked dinner roll, you aren't going to be happy with the celery. You are still going to crave the roll, and many people will go ahead and get the roll, only to be angry with themselves for their "weakness". Why have so many people allowed themselves to be programmed in this way? Why do people honestly believe that eating even basic foods like bread and fruit are moral failings?
Look, you're not in this world for very long as it is. Life should be lived and enjoyed without guilt and misery over the simplest things that harm no one. Is your eating a blueberry muffin harming anyone? No, it isn't, unless you enslaved some poor little European grandmother to bake it for you at gunpoint. Use guilt for appropriate things, like when you really did hurt someone else. Guilt is there to teach you to behave better toward other people, and it sickens me that it's been co-opted for stupid shit like having sexual thoughts (thanks, religions of the world) or enjoying even the smallest bite of food.
Eat, live, be happy. And have some guilt-free sex, too, okay? Do it for me. I command you.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
New Job
I recently quit my job at the aquarium store because the boss/owner was, to put it delicately, in need of something along the lines of Seroquel. I was offered a job at a factory doing quality assurance on their product (a flour/yeast based dry product, I won't say more than that). It's fairly easy, as lab tech jobs go, and the environment is friendly and clean. I'm replacing someone who, for unfathomable reasons, simply stopped doing her job entirely about a month ago, and had been doing almost the bare minimum for over a year. I walked into a situation that needed a serious cleanup and reorganization before I could actually get any real work done, so I have been interspersing the quality assurance work with major cleaning and organizing. I stunned the guys at the factory by catching up on lab samples so much that I am waiting on them to make product for me to test every day.
I worked pretty hard on Monday and Tuesday (today). I cleaned the lab from top to bottom and reorganized all the cabinets. I threw away a LOT of junk. The previous tech had never washed the plastic beakers after doing the proof tests (letting dough rise to test the yeast activity). So there were layers and layers of tape, petrified dough, and Pam spray (it becomes tacky and nasty if not washed away). I scrubbed the ones that were not too bad, but I had to throw out a LOT of them because they were just unsalvageable. I found a drawer full of sauce packets (old, disgusting ones), menus, and unwashed flatware. She had squirreled away a lot of personal mail in the lab as well--two years' worth of pay stubs, time warner bills, nastygrams from her kid's school ("he's a brat, so we're suspending him"), and some kind of "I'm poor, give me money" government form. Also, I found a pair of shoes, bottles of lotion, a dirty toothbrush and toothpaste, some weight loss pills, and some feminine hygiene products. The items that were not spoiled food were put into a box with her name on it. I really hope she has the sense to be embarrassed that someone else had to put her tampons in a box for her.
Other items I threw out: Empty cans of Pam (hi, TOSS IT IN THE TRASH instead of sticking it in a cabinet, it's EASIER!), chains of paperclips that were used as decorative garland (and tacky/sticky with flour and Pam), plastic containers that were warped beyond recognition from being microwaved, a toddler's sippy cup, Vogue magazines, a paper with various non-work-related websites (myspace, classmates, etc) with usernames and passwords, and test mixes dated 2005 (this means she hadn't been doing that test since 2005). I bagged up a bunch of stuff that had been in cardboard boxes that were falling apart and filthy, and I wiped every surface in the room, because there was a layer of flour on everything, including the chair, computer keyboard and mouse, and the paperwork binders. The floor was scrubbed, and I was surprised to discover that I did NOT, in fact, have the only non-field laboratory with a dirt floor; there was tile under the layer of blackened, greasy filth. I also found out that the oil sampling dipstick (a pole about 7 ft long that has a bottle at the end for sampling out of soy oil delivery trucks) was actually a white object, not grey and black camouflage as it had appeared. Apparently, if you scrub oily, dirty things with this magic stuff called soap, it can become clean. What's more disturbing is that the grimy, blackened pole was going into the oil that was to be used for food products. I don't know WHY the hell nobody said anything about that, but, yuck! Also, it now hangs up on the wall instead of being put on the floor. I have this compulsion about stuff that is going into food products being on the floor and not washed. I'm just weird like that.
Anyway, I inventoried and labeled the cabinets and drawers, filed paperwork that was long overdue to be filed, and managed to get all the other work done too. If they choose to hire someone else instead of making me permanent, they will be missing out. Right now, I'm a temp working for a lab support agency. The company needed to get someone in there pronto to rectify the situation after a major quality assurance issue, and they've invested a lot of money in the crash-course training I got. It wouldn't be cost effective to hire someone else and have to train them, if I'm already doing a good job. I never, however, rely on anyone to use common sense, so I'm keeping my options open.
I worked pretty hard on Monday and Tuesday (today). I cleaned the lab from top to bottom and reorganized all the cabinets. I threw away a LOT of junk. The previous tech had never washed the plastic beakers after doing the proof tests (letting dough rise to test the yeast activity). So there were layers and layers of tape, petrified dough, and Pam spray (it becomes tacky and nasty if not washed away). I scrubbed the ones that were not too bad, but I had to throw out a LOT of them because they were just unsalvageable. I found a drawer full of sauce packets (old, disgusting ones), menus, and unwashed flatware. She had squirreled away a lot of personal mail in the lab as well--two years' worth of pay stubs, time warner bills, nastygrams from her kid's school ("he's a brat, so we're suspending him"), and some kind of "I'm poor, give me money" government form. Also, I found a pair of shoes, bottles of lotion, a dirty toothbrush and toothpaste, some weight loss pills, and some feminine hygiene products. The items that were not spoiled food were put into a box with her name on it. I really hope she has the sense to be embarrassed that someone else had to put her tampons in a box for her.
Other items I threw out: Empty cans of Pam (hi, TOSS IT IN THE TRASH instead of sticking it in a cabinet, it's EASIER!), chains of paperclips that were used as decorative garland (and tacky/sticky with flour and Pam), plastic containers that were warped beyond recognition from being microwaved, a toddler's sippy cup, Vogue magazines, a paper with various non-work-related websites (myspace, classmates, etc) with usernames and passwords, and test mixes dated 2005 (this means she hadn't been doing that test since 2005). I bagged up a bunch of stuff that had been in cardboard boxes that were falling apart and filthy, and I wiped every surface in the room, because there was a layer of flour on everything, including the chair, computer keyboard and mouse, and the paperwork binders. The floor was scrubbed, and I was surprised to discover that I did NOT, in fact, have the only non-field laboratory with a dirt floor; there was tile under the layer of blackened, greasy filth. I also found out that the oil sampling dipstick (a pole about 7 ft long that has a bottle at the end for sampling out of soy oil delivery trucks) was actually a white object, not grey and black camouflage as it had appeared. Apparently, if you scrub oily, dirty things with this magic stuff called soap, it can become clean. What's more disturbing is that the grimy, blackened pole was going into the oil that was to be used for food products. I don't know WHY the hell nobody said anything about that, but, yuck! Also, it now hangs up on the wall instead of being put on the floor. I have this compulsion about stuff that is going into food products being on the floor and not washed. I'm just weird like that.
Anyway, I inventoried and labeled the cabinets and drawers, filed paperwork that was long overdue to be filed, and managed to get all the other work done too. If they choose to hire someone else instead of making me permanent, they will be missing out. Right now, I'm a temp working for a lab support agency. The company needed to get someone in there pronto to rectify the situation after a major quality assurance issue, and they've invested a lot of money in the crash-course training I got. It wouldn't be cost effective to hire someone else and have to train them, if I'm already doing a good job. I never, however, rely on anyone to use common sense, so I'm keeping my options open.
Always wear sunscreen!
Last week, I wound up with a killer cluster headache. If you don't know about cluster headaches, they are horrible things that are worse than migraines (I get both). It feels like a white hot drill is drilling into your eyeball. If you have one, you tend to try to hit your head on things, push so hard on your eyeball that you nearly gouge it out, and you want to be alone and away from light. While lying down tends to help migraines, it makes clusters worse. The nostril on the afflicted side stuffs up, and the eye becomes teary. You get almost no warning when they are about to strike; they come on very suddenly, with maybe a hint of an aura (like with migraines), just enough to let you say, "Oh no, not THIS again." When they're over, they go just as suddenly, but not after making you seriously consider shooting yourself in the head or finding a heroin dealer. Sometimes Brian can massage them away, but this one wasn't going ANYWHERE.
This time, however, I had a secret weapon--a secret stash of a single, very expensive Maxalt pill, the quick-dissolving kind. These are prescription only, and they can be pretty dangerous for people with heart problems, and I hadn't yet taken one before. I figured I'd just store it in my cupboard until the expiration ran out. Once that cluster hit, though, I tried everything before deciding to risk the Maxalt ( Yes, I do have a prescription for Vicoprofen, but that didn't touch it). I let Brian know what the risks were, and asked him to keep an eye on me (I don't have heart problems or high blood pressure, but you never know what might happen), and let that sucker dissolve under my tongue.
Within a few minutes, the cluster slowed down to a dull throb, and I was verrry sleepy. I dropped off into a deep sleep, and I awoke a few hours later, headache-free, very mellow, but utterly exhausted. When the cluster is over, you feel like you have run a marathon in your brain. You don't feel the pain, but you're just completely spent.
Now, I've relayed this whole cluster headache story to set up for what I did this weekend. Karen and I went to the Waterford Canalfest on Saturday. It was very sunny out, and I got scorched. The thing is, we weren't there long enough for me to get as horribly burned as I did. It's now Tuesday afternoon, and it's not getting better--and it hurts like fricken hell. I'd forgotten that Maxalt makes you REALLY sensitive to sunlight. Worse than antibiotics sensitive. I'd pretty much forgotten that I had taken it, so I didn't even think about sunscreen. I'm just glad I managed to pick up some sunglasses, because I would have been half-blind for a couple days in addition to being broiled.
I guess I deserved the rather nasty lesson in ALWAYS WEARING SUNSCREEN!
This time, however, I had a secret weapon--a secret stash of a single, very expensive Maxalt pill, the quick-dissolving kind. These are prescription only, and they can be pretty dangerous for people with heart problems, and I hadn't yet taken one before. I figured I'd just store it in my cupboard until the expiration ran out. Once that cluster hit, though, I tried everything before deciding to risk the Maxalt ( Yes, I do have a prescription for Vicoprofen, but that didn't touch it). I let Brian know what the risks were, and asked him to keep an eye on me (I don't have heart problems or high blood pressure, but you never know what might happen), and let that sucker dissolve under my tongue.
Within a few minutes, the cluster slowed down to a dull throb, and I was verrry sleepy. I dropped off into a deep sleep, and I awoke a few hours later, headache-free, very mellow, but utterly exhausted. When the cluster is over, you feel like you have run a marathon in your brain. You don't feel the pain, but you're just completely spent.
Now, I've relayed this whole cluster headache story to set up for what I did this weekend. Karen and I went to the Waterford Canalfest on Saturday. It was very sunny out, and I got scorched. The thing is, we weren't there long enough for me to get as horribly burned as I did. It's now Tuesday afternoon, and it's not getting better--and it hurts like fricken hell. I'd forgotten that Maxalt makes you REALLY sensitive to sunlight. Worse than antibiotics sensitive. I'd pretty much forgotten that I had taken it, so I didn't even think about sunscreen. I'm just glad I managed to pick up some sunglasses, because I would have been half-blind for a couple days in addition to being broiled.
I guess I deserved the rather nasty lesson in ALWAYS WEARING SUNSCREEN!
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Yes!
I saw a wonderful quote from someone on fark.com today, with the username FarFarAway.
"As someone who has just recently won an 8 year long war with their doctors over whether or not I had hypothyroidism, I say fark all of the idiots out there who think that just because they don't have a problem, no one else is entitled to have one. You want to discount my health because you think you know what I do or don't do to maintain it? Screw you."
Yes! Thank you! I could not say it better or more succinctly.
"As someone who has just recently won an 8 year long war with their doctors over whether or not I had hypothyroidism, I say fark all of the idiots out there who think that just because they don't have a problem, no one else is entitled to have one. You want to discount my health because you think you know what I do or don't do to maintain it? Screw you."
Yes! Thank you! I could not say it better or more succinctly.
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