Vic's "About Me and my 'Diet'"

I have had an odd, freighted relationship with food. After being a slender, somewhat sickly child, I "plumped up" around puberty, freaked out, had an eating disorder (although I must note that eating disorders are much more complex than weight and food issues, the other root issues and, really, the topic of eating disorders are outside of the purview of this blog), and spent a long time after that "evolving" a healthy relationship with food and body image. Most of my young adult life I was on the thin side, tried to eat healthy food, and strengthen my body with regular exercise (after a fling with aerobics in college I have settled into preferring walking, cardio and weight-training, and yoga). Odd little things started happening as time went by--like testing as border-line high cholesterol even though my diet was pretty low-fat, then I began to stack on weight steadily, basically gaining 20 pounds in 10 years while eating healthfully and leading a fairly active life-style (mind you, since I was basically underweight when it started you wouldn't think that I had gained twenty-odd pounds, and I have no doubt at least *some* of it was increased muscle mass--but still, one notices when these things happen to oneself). Most recently some pretty bizarre health issues took me in to the doctor who, after a series of blood and hormone tests, pronounced a diagnosis: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome or PCOS.

Now PCOS is highly prevalent in the population, and in some sense it was a relief to have a name for what was going on, but no one likes to hear "Syndrome" and be told that there is something wrong with you that does bad things like make you gain weight, adversely affect fertility, and possibly lead to diabetes... PCOS is a very complicated syndrome which the medical community is still struggling to understand--it affects hormone levels and the body's use of glucose and insulin in unknown ways that resemble the "chicken or the egg" argument. The bottom line for diet is that someone with PCOS handles glucose and insulin differently (probably due to hormonal deficiencies) and in a way in which the 'wrong' diet will make you gain twice as much weight, twice as fast as the next person, and from there it is a slippery slope toward insulin resistance and diabetes. Oddly enough, these this same stuff affects fertility, in that the hormones that regulate the cycle get out of whack, and that makes the other stuff worse--or vice versa--see, chicken or egg. This must all be fought against every day by very strict and taxing applications of diet and exercise--which can in turn help stabilize hormone and insulin levels, allow weight loss, prevent weight gain.

There are good things and bad things, diet-wise, that have come out of this. I was told that while my over-all cholesterol levels were relatively high, and the "bad" chol. levels on the way to being border-line high, those were basically completely negated by my "good" chol. levels, which are so high as to be off the charts (and really the only reason the overall chol. number is high; these days drs. prefer to look at the percentage relationship between the individual components and the total chol. #, which in my case, are actually excellent)--thanks to my already good diet and exercise, which had also prevented me, apparently, according to a blood-insulin test, kept me from being "insulin resistant." After reading lots of books about it, though, I had a hard time thinking there was nothing going on in that department since I was gaining weight and keeping weight on, while consuming a sensible diet that your average citizen would either be losing or maintaining on, so I tried to do what a lot of the books suggest: cut wayyyyy down on simple, processed carbs (good-bye scones) and increasing lean protein consumption (I was not a huge meat-eater before). Some of the recommended diets were too extreme to endure, and no doubt I will blog about them, but I have settled into something that probably resembles the South Beach diet more than anything. The key seems to be the proportion of protein to carbohydrate, and wayyyyyyy low sugar. I have ups and downs, weight-wise, although within about a 5 pound range--and it's amazing what 5 pounds will do (and what little I have to do to gain it or what great efforts I have to take to lose it), but I feel like I'm getting a wee bit of a grip on it. I still have my moments of extreme resentment---such when I realize that I will have to be on a "diet" for the rest of my life just to maintain the status quo--a diet which for most people would promote dramatic weight loss, and when my latest doctor informed me that I would probably have to work out an hour--actually she said do cardio exercise for an hour---every day, in order to fight the hormonal and other chemical results of this syndrome, which apparently works reeeeeeally hard to make its victims fat, infertile, and possibly diabetic. Haven't quite managed that...but I'm workin' pretty hard.

So basically I have become a font of dietary and exercise knowledge and information, and sometimes I share that with Sister Em, and this is how the experiment of exchanging food diaries came about. She had said something about gaining weight, and I had asked her about her diet and exercise, and it went on from there. I think Em is one of those Average Americans who really doesn't think a lot about what they eat--they eat what they like, what they are used to, and what they manage to order or throw together between picking the kids up from school and taking them to base-ball practice. And unfortunately, as we get older, and we get too busy to exercies much or whip up these fabulously tasty and healthy gourmet meals, our metabolisms slow down, and the food habits of a life-time start piling around our waist-lines. Someone like me, on the other hand, who has been obsessive with food, both in unhealthy and healthy ways, has a very different approach, I guess, and I am now, sadly, forced to consider such things as complex versus simple carbs, ratio of carbs to protein, and hidden sugars twice as hard as I did before. Ah well, c'est la vie!