TMI? BMI? Can We Talk?

That's the magnolia I found blooming on my tree today when I got back from getting my hair cut. It was low enough on the branch for me to be able to reach it, pull it down a bit, and take its picture. The petals are completely unblemished, huge, waxy, and perfect. I so wanted to snap it off the branch and bring it in but I could not do it. It is exactly where it should be. 

It was so good to see Melissa. They got their power back on this very morning. So it had been off a week. They were lucky and only had one tree come down and it mostly took out their screened porch and utility room. She told me that their entire neighborhood is so stacked with huge tree trunks and limbs on the sides of the roads that you couldn't fit another stick on one of them and no one can do a darn thing until the city comes and gets all of it. 
And then I ended up talking way too much. So much that when I was done and was sitting in the car again, I made a vow to myself to shut the fuck up and let other people talk more. I know it's because I see other people so rarely and the words just pour out of me but it's ridiculous and it's sad. And Melissa is so kind and so sweet that she just let me go on. She also cut off about eight inches of my hair. The main difference it makes to me is the number of times I twist it when I put it up in a bun. Instead of having to make about five twists, I'm now good with two. 

My car is not running. Something about the 12-volt starter battery in the Prius. And of course Mr. Moon does not have time to work on that right now. Luckily, we have about half a dozen vehicles that do run in the yard so I've been driving "his" Camry. I stopped by Costco on my way home to get gas and after waiting in line for about fifteen minutes, I pulled up to the pump to realize that I had no idea how to open the gas tank. Where the lever is to open mine is where the lever is to open the hood on Glen's car. So I pulled on out and parked and found the owner's manual and looked it up. 
It was a big "duh." 
Then I drove back and got in line again and finally was able to fill it up. 

The Tom saga continues. I won't go into any details except to say that Glen finally convinced him to let him rent a small excavator or some other heavy machinery type thing to get the spot cleared for the new house. Tom fought that like a beast. There are two palm trees on the spot they need to use due to proximity to power, water, and the septic tank, and Tom is obsessed with his palm trees. They're swallowed up at this point in azaleas which have gotten so huge that you can't even see the palms so that says a lot right there. Mr. Moon promised him he'd dig up the palms and not kill them and thus, an agreement was finally reached. 
This has all gone beyond impossible. 

So okay, I want to talk about obesity and the new drugs that are changing the way we treat it. I listened to a podcast (Armchair Expert) and the guest was Sanjay Gupta who has a documentary coming out about this subject soon. 
It was rather eye-opening. 
The way these drugs work, very simply, is that after we eat, we release a hormone that tells us that we are full and we don't really worry about food until we actually need to eat again. The thing is, many people don't seem to produce enough of this hormone to tell our bodies that they've been fed and the drugs help to increase that hormonal release. Evolutionarily, not producing too much of the hormone may have been a good thing. If someone a very long time ago had access to a lot of food at one time, it was probably a sound idea to eat all they could before the food spoiled, thus storing whatever the body didn't need for fuel at that time as fat. In fact, the ability to store energy as fat was probably a trait that got passed down due to the fact that people who had it lived long enough to produce more progeny who also had the trait. But we don't live in that world any more. Or at least most of us don't. We live in a world where densely caloric foods are available to us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And many of these foods are cleverly designed to trigger our appetite with chemicals and sweeteners and flavors that no one a thousand years ago had access to and, appetite triggered, we feel that we must be hungry and we reach for those foods.
I could go on for days about this. 

But let's get back to obesity. Of course there are a huge number of reasons that people become overweight. Lack of exercise and eating too much is definitely one of them and for people to whom exercise comes naturally and who have a healthy amount of the hormone that causes us to shut off what they are now calling "food chatter," that seems like the simplest thing in the world. 
Move more and eat less, you fools!
I will never forget having a friend who was preternaturally thin. I mean- so thin you wondered where her internal organs were. And she ate whatever she wanted. At that time I was literally eating about 800 calories a day and was still not at the weight I wanted to be. Yes, I did have an eating disorder. Anyway, she suggested to me that instead of eating dessert, maybe I should just try eating half a grapefruit. 
As if I ever, ever ate dessert. 

When I was at what I thought was a reasonable weight, I had literally become obsessed with diet and exercise. Not quite an eating disorder but definitely an obsession. I worked for Weight Watchers which works and is a good plan and which is healthy and sensible. I would get up at 5:45 a.m. and walk for an hour every week day. I lifted weights. I measured out my portions. I cooked beautiful meals that had to be very creative in order to fit the criteria of the food plan. And eventually, I even adopted a way of eating that I called "all healthy and shit" which was basically incredibly high in fiber (fruits and vegetables and beans and nuts and whole grains), and incredibly low in sugars, fats, flour, dairy products and red meat. 
For years, my go-to snack was raw almonds and prunes. I kept bags of them in my car and in my purse.
And this worked. I didn't have to weigh my portions. I ate from the ground up. I made my own bread so dense with flax seed, oat bran, and whole wheat flour that occasionally Mr. Moon would ask me if I could please make some "fluffy" bread. We ate quinoa and brown rice only, hardly any pasta, virtually no cheese, no butter, no...
Well. No a lot of stuff. And when you don't allow yourself to eat the "fun foods" like cheese and crackers and chicken salad with mayonnaise in it, there's not nearly as much temptation to overeat. 

Then anxiety hit me hard and for months I could not eat. When your body is in fight or flight all the time, which is what mine was, eating is not a big priority. When I finally started getting better with medication and time, my appetite returned and I just wanted for once to eat what I wanted to eat. 
And white flour and white rice and pasta and cheese were re-introduced to my diet and within a few years, I was overweight. I still exercised, I still ate relatively healthy food, but I also ate things that I had not allowed myself to eat before. 

I hate being overweight. I just do. I don't judge others for being overweight. I know quite well the place we put food in our culture and society and I know that being slim is not always being healthy and isn't the standard for beauty. But for me, I feel a great amount of shame about my body which is a WHOLE other subject. One would think that at this stage of my life I just would not care but that's not true. And it's not just about appearance. I hate taking medicine for high cholesterol, I hate taking medicine for high blood pressure. I hate my mobility being challenged in ways that it would not be if I lost weight. 
I hate that I hate looking in a mirror and that I actively and deliberately avoid it as much as possible. 

But do I hate all of this enough to go back to my obsessive ways of eating and exercising? 
Honestly, I do not. I really don't think I could.
Would I consider taking a drug that helped me to eat less? 
You fucking bet I would. 

I have a lot more to say about this. Sanjay talked a lot about how we may need to view obesity as a disorder in and of itself and quit thinking of it as just the result of bad habits. How people used to feel that anti-depressants and anxiety medications were just ways to prevent people from pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and getting on with it. People who went to psychiatrists were often considered self-absorbed and absurd. And then it became accepted knowledge that depression and anxiety and other now-diagnosed mental illnesses were indeed illnesses. I know damn well how I've felt when people have told me that depression was a choice. That they just got up every morning and decided to be happy. I should try that! 
And now we have the same beliefs about obesity. Just get up every morning and go exercise and make a decision to not eat so much! That you're somehow "cheating" if you take one of these new drugs to lose weight, just as you're weak if you need to take drugs to simply get out of bed every morning and face the world. To decide to keep on living. 

I want to discuss this some more. And I will. 

But hey! It's Friday night! Not that my husband's home to make my martini. He rented the little excavator that he needs to clear that space and he's planning on using it until dark. And then he'll get up in the morning and go use it again. It's supposed to storm here tonight and maybe tomorrow. I talked to him on the phone and told him that if Tom wants to come spend the night, to bring him home. But. That if Tom says he'll be fine in his tree-busted trailer and that he doesn't want to come over, to just let him stay there but to promise me that he will not get up at 3:00 a.m. to go get him if storms do indeed occur. 
He promised me. 

There are clean sheets on the bed but I seriously doubt that Mr. Moon would notice if I hadn't washed those sheets in months and a muddy dog had rolled around in them. 

Happy Friday, y'all. 

Love...Ms. Moon