The Cancer of Fat...

If I told you I had cancer, would you have more compassion?  If I told the cells were spreading, would you wear a ribbon in my honor?  If I told you that the cancer leaves me extremely fatigued with no energy would you send up prayers for me?  Would you post my picture on Facebook and request to receive a million likes?

I often wonder about the compassion of a world that does this for cancer, but practices the horrific act of fat shaming.  Just like cancer, the food I have ingested makes me victim to it.  Just like cancer the process the food has under gone continues in my system.

To make matters worse, food is a legal drug.  I transitioned from a time of pure food to a time when all sorts of things are added to food to preserve it.  Unfortunately, it has preserved my weight.  The chemicals have also altered my thyroid.  I have food allergies that I haven't identified yet.  So until that time comes, if it ever comes, I will continue to swell.

If I said I had cancer, would you exploit it for your own entertainment?  Would you cancer-shame me on Facebook because my cancer has outgrown me?  Would you share videos of me on World Star or YouTube showing me taking chemotherapy and my hair falling out while it's passed around countless times on the internet?  Would you laugh along with all those laughing at my wigs that cover up the bald patterns carved through my head for cancer?

Probably not.

But as a society, we do it to fat people.  Because if we'd just stop eating, we'd lose the weight, right?  WRONG.  First you have to move past the addiction.  Some people never make it past that.  My brother didn't.  At 21 years of age he succumbed to the Cancer of Fat...693lbs wrestled his heart and stilled it in the seventh month, on the 19th day in the year 1991.  For years afterwards, I ran scared, behaving recklessly because I was sure I would also die as he did, 30 days shy of my 21st birthday.

Well I made it to 21 and now I sit here, in my living room on my couch in the midst of praise.  Yes.  I am fat.  Morbidly obese even, but in the nucleus of my heart is the love of God.  This blog and all of you are my support group.  I have suffered  from the cancer of obesity most of my life.  I have self medicated with laughter, jokes, make-up and more food.

Attempts to thwart the Cancer have been futile.  I have been a vegetarian, a Jenny Craig dropout, went into a state of ketosis, injected prenatal urine, had gastric bypass surgery.  Fat shaming is an act of ill repute.  It slowly kills the fat person and diminishes the heart of the shamer.    Before you go shaming a fat person, realize that Fat is a Cancer...

When the Diet Lacks...Just Try FLAX

So, if you're anything like me, then the reality is you are carnivorous like a mo-fo.  I know that I am attempting this power-up of juice, but I haven't stopped eating, I have just replaced 2 meals.  I have also noticed that when I added flax seed to  my Nuttriblast it thickened up.  I find this to be great because I felt as though I had sustenance.

I am attempting to change my own mind.  Find adequate substitutes for the things that I know aren't any good for me.

The night before last I had a 6 inch tuna.  I am going to have to learn how to have sandwiches without bread, wrapped in lettuce.

I really wish I had someone around here that I could encourage that could encourage me to do this.  Partners are always better...don't you think?

YOU CAN GET WITH THIS...OR YOU CAN GET WITH THAT....

 Who knew that the hook to a Black Sheep song would be so spot on?  If it was as simple as choosing the right thing, do you know how many of us "morbidly obese" people would be thin?

Let me retract that.  I do not now, nor have I ever wanted to be thin.  I want my hour glass figure.  Right now I am up to 3 1/2 hours.  Yes, I do have a coke bottle figure.  It's a 3 liter, but it's a Coca-Cola figure none the less.  I don't suffer from the traditional fat girl stigma's.  I am not a loner.  I don't lack friends.  Men are generally attracted to me.  What I may face is a desire to reclaim my health.

You know what I hate?  The minute you say you are going to eat differently, anything solid that goes into your mouth is subject to a comment.  Most of those commenting have no idea what it's like to be addicted to a legal drug.  We live in a country where things you could not imagine are put in the food for color, enhancement of the taste or for their addictive properties.

I am scared.  Genetically Modified Foods are the order of the day.  It depletes of our health and the very nutrients in our body.  They are in bed with the pharmaceuticals who created my Tramodol, and muscle relaxers to make standing with Osteoarthritis bearable.

I searched through my health booklet to see if my health plan covers these clinics that are like rehabs in that they give you a live food diet and restrict the use of sugar.  Of course the answer was no.
Low income people of color are a booming business and my food addiction will pay someone as much as a million dollars in my lifetime.  To hell with addictions.

I'm in the store the other day, in my diversified neighborhood of color and I see that a 20 ounce bottle of water is $2.16 with tax, but a 1 liter Coca-Cola is almost ALWAYS on sale for 99 cents?  What the hell?  Coincidence?  I should say not.

Tonight began with me being more than a little perturbed with myself.  Then I think,  "the rest of the world won't let up Renee...maybe you should."  I am on this journey.  Being mad won't change it.  This is day four of working through the sludge...any fellow prisoners wanna break through together?

MANGO MADNESS...

Oh Glory!  I have found fruit in the desert of my freezer!  i was so over a total vegetable Nutriblast (although I am quite aware that an all vegetable blast would completely aid in my weight loss goals).   I was in the freezer, searching for some protien to feed my family (these men I live with are all lean eating machines).  They will not participate in my new regime, I know that they won't.

My cousin asked me today if we'd all take accountability.  She thought it be a great idea for a couple of us that are friends hold each other to the promises we are making to one another.  She wants to ensure that we all have the support we need to overcome our issues with weight.

"Do you need to go audition for Extreme Weight Loss?" she asked.  "Yeah, I said.  These guys do body and MIND transformation.

In that moment I realized, Renee, you will remain fat as long as your mind is fat.  I'm not interested in looking like anyone else, being the world's depiction of beautiful.  I want to be healthy.  I want to have some babies.  I don't want to keep waiting for my life to start.This is what I feel I have been doing....waiting.  In a sorted type of limbo.  A transition.

As I said in an earlier post, I'm suppose to have the surgery sometime in March, although I was never given an exact date.  It's funny, I believe that's for a reason.  I don't want temporary relief.  I want to be well.  I want to live my life, not just exist.

So here I am sitting at this table telling my truth, yet again...

God, please...is my blogging in vain?  Please let the answer be no...

Today's Recipe

1/2 cup of Spinach 

4 baby carrots 

1 head of broccoli

1/4 cup of flaxseed

Southern Comfort

I have to overhaul my entire way of eating.  I realize that my cooking expertise is a familial curse.  After cooking yesterday and tasting, (my taste buds inundated with what they've grown to label as delicious) I looked at my cuisine and labeled it diabetes in a pot.  God knows I want my health.  I deserve it even.

I purchased some index cards to begin to interview my characters for a book I am working on, but I began to write my truths.

I had to admit my finances suffer with a bout of anorexia.  They haven't been healthy for years.  I realize I am guilty of surrounding myself with people who take instead of giving.  I am always uplifting, never uplifted.

I take on the burdens of others to free myself from looking upon my own.  It has grown old.  I am staring my truth down.

I sat at my mother's counter on Sunday morning, watching how she carefully went about cooking her beef roast, candied yams, mac & cheese, and salad.  The smells in the kitchen danced through out and my mind began to wonder how my mother would cook a Mediterranean meal and how vast would her knowledge be of healthy foods to save her own life.

Today, I ate nothing.  I snuck a piece of skirt steak that I was cooking for my son and my husband yesterday.  This sent me on a vomit binge.  Today, I was to week and tired to even try to eat.  So, I close the night with water and veggies...  

It's Me...It's Me Oh Lord, Standing In the Need of Prayer...

Height: 5'6

Weight: 324 lbs.

Mood: Depressed

So, I purchased a Nutribullet.  Yes, I have a juicer, and I have that Montell Williams blender, but the annoyance of cleaning the juicer and the lack of portion control with the blender stopped me cold from using both of them.  I woke up this morning and walked into ground zero (my kitchen) and began cleaning.  I am big on family gatherings and in my family, family gatherings mean food.  I had fried chicken, baked macaroni and cheese (3 cheese), collard greens with smoked turkey, and a salad of field greens and cherry tomatoes.  My two sisters, my mom and 6 nieces and a common law boyfriend dropped in.  That count did not include my husband and son, so yeah, them too.  After playing the lead waitress, my body could not take it.  It took me half the week to recuperate and just like, clean the dishes!  The pots I did this morning after a long soak.  As I woke this morning, I realized that I had fallen into a funk that I condemned myself to, that I was doomed to stay in if I don't make changes.

I began to look at my weight this morning not in pounds, but in disappointments and false comfort.  Every friendship I lost, every job I walked away from, every false witness bore against me.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm no saint, but I realize my sin lies in making the wrong decisions.  My sins lie in opening myself up to people who have not earned the right to get to the heart of me.  As a result, more times than not, I am like the character above, eating away the pain I can't seem to get away from.  I never stand up for myself the way I should.  I allow people who don't think much of themselves to wipe their emotional feet on me as though I were a doormat and I continue to look for the best in them.  The light that might have gone out eons ago.  I learned to seek from searching for parental love.  How does a child with SO much love inside come from two people so guarded?  So I've been seeking the love I give out for years.  My experience has taught me to look in barren places.  No place was more sweet or giving than food.  How it would get down on the insides of me and warm up the places that were so cold that my very soul was chilled.  Food hid the victim, food stood with me, food excepted me.  It all made sense though, how could food not accept what it helped to create?

So here I am, one month and two days shy of my 40th birthday.  I do not want to live my life like this.  Like I'm 39, but feeling 69.  It's me oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.  Help me to detox and then to live so you can use me.  It's time for me to break my "friendship" with food.  Help me to reprogram my mind God.

Today's Recipe

1/2 cup of spinach

1/2 cup of melon/cantaloupe/pineapple

4 cherry tomatoes

1 tablespoon of flax seed

placed these in the large cup of my Nutribullet and blended...not bad.

AMEN

TAKING IT TO THE EXTREME...

334lbs...steadily climbing to 400.  I am more afraid than I have ever been in my life.  Next month I turn 39, but I'm living as though I am 69.  Hospitals, ambulette services and the newest sitcom is the way I am spending my life...I've lost too many days.

As many of you know, I have had gastric bypass, but I didn't learn the things I needed to learn to keep the weight off.

So now my doctor is talking a revision surgery.  There is a huge part of me that wants this.  I just want the weight gone.  Yet, there is this other part of me saying, Renee, you've gotta learn the right way.  Is it crazy to say I just want someone to believe in me?

In comes Chris and Heidi.  Extreme Makeover Weight Loss Edition.  I'm looking at their passion for helping people reconfigure their minds and then their bodies, and I realize, I WANT THAT.  I NEED THAT.

I've spent the better part of my life helping others.  My phone rings all types of night with messages and calls for my spiritual counsel and it's the only thing keeping me alive.  I have gotten remarried since I last really blogged and it has not been easy.  Although we love one another, our illnesses have taken their toll on us.  My husband is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and has PTSD dude to his service.  Then due to this weighty prison, I have suffered 3 miscarriages.  Three babies, gone.  Even at home, in what's supposed to be my safe space, my time is not my own.  I have become my husband's care giver.  There is also my 17 year-old son to think of, so between the two, there is not much time for myself.  In my sitcom watching, I get caught up in EWLME...looking at Chris' compassion for his clients...watching he how has been able to lift that mirror for them and show them they have everything they need WITHIN them.  I want to believe that I have something left for me.  I knew I needed that compassion that they offered.

So, I go online to apply.  Much to my chagrin, the casting was closed, and continued to be every single time I checked...and then it happened!   OPEN CASTING CALLS!!!!  YEAH BABY!!!  Then in creeps Doubt.  (I swear I can't stand her...she's loud and she's ghetto!)

"You ain't got no car!  How are you getting to Philadelphia to this casting call???"

Megabus, I say to her in my mind, determined to silence her know-it-all tone.

"But you ain't got no money!"  To which I reply smiling...

I got God and determination...sounds like stacks to me!  So I filled in the pre-application.  I filled out my story and I'm also going to go to Philly on 2/15...wish me luck?

Tonight's Meal

My husband cooked, so no recipe, but I ate his stewed steak, with chicken flavored pasta and potatoes