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Here’s an open survey post – how would you respond if it was discovered with finality that obesity did not cause illness at all?

Respond in comments. Responses with “but it does” will not be printed, because it’s not relevant to the question. Use your imagination.

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I have completed two months on Sensa and it feels a whole lot like nothing.  According to my Wii fit, I’ve lost another couple of pounds.  The problem with really slow systems is that you don’t get the consistent reinforcement of significant weight loss, so you begin to wonder if it works at all.

I’m going to keep with it, since the scale is going in the right direction and I currently have a six month supply bought and paid for.

I’ve been wondering though, because I went from eating all kinds of crap to very little crap and you’d think there would be more of a dramatic weight loss by now.

What I find is that I don’t have cravings.  I don’t sit around obsessing about what to eat next.  Yes, I just had a small bag of chips with my sandwich, but I didn’t slaver about them before eating them, they were just a nice accompaniment to my turkey on wheat.

Twice now I have left Sensa shakers in restaurants.  One was a shaker that had only salty tastants in it, it was shipped to me with no sweet tastants.  I let that one go.  As for the other, I called the restaurant, but they had already thrown it away.  D’oh!  No biggie.  My plan is to use up the other canister (two weeks supply) and move on to month four.  I can’t be bothered with freaking out about it.

Also, big news.  I stopped taking my Micardis/HCT.  This has a diuretic in it, but for some reason, I seemed to be retaining massive amounts of water.  Also, my metabolism ground to a halt. When I stopped the medication, I started drinking and peeing like crazy.  I also feel a mite better.  I think that this has helped weight loss tremendously.

For a few years now I have had a very dopey feeling.  I don’t feel as sharp as I remember being, I have no energy and I feel muffled emotionally.  Also, while I normally am very good about writing, I’ve had no inspiration to do so.

Interestingly enough this seems to have coincided with taking anti-anxiety/depressants.  I know you’ll be shocked, but I’ve discovered that anti-depressants cause weight gain!  I wanted the drugs to help me stop obsessing about food, and that’s all good, but now getting the weight off is SUPER-HARD.  I will be discussing a plan with my doctor to wean off the Celexa.  Apparently this is not something one does cold turkey.

I started taking sub-lingual B-complex.  It’s not great tasting, but I’ve had worse things in my mouth.

As summer arrives I find that I’m not working out at all.  I need to change that.

I don’t have any real revelations about weight loss, but with another 6 months of Sensa I think you can say that I’ve given it a fair shake.  (Pun intended.)

Note/Reminder:

While Fat Chic is in no way a diet blog, I am aware that many readers do look into these, and since Ruth is someone I know and respect in real life, I felt her experience might in some way inform the experiences of those who do have multiple diet/health issues to consider. While I personally favor HAES I know women in real life who are regular readers of this blog who have or are pursuing diet programs including Weight Watchers, LA Weight loss when that was still around and in general mad workouts. While I do not and will not take part in these diet systems, I absolutely support women I care about doing whatever it takes to make peace with their bodies.

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The problem with early success with any weight-loss gizmo is that it’s hard to know where to give credit when things are going right. For example, I’ve lost a few pounds recently, what really caused it?

1. Working out more frequently and for a longer duration
2. Giving up sugar.
3. Having two bouts of the flu within the past four weeks.
4. Sprinkling my magic fairy dust on my food.

The point is that I have no expectation that the Sensa is a be-all and end-all. It’s just one more thing that helps.

Here are some psychological things that I’ve noticed:

1. I feel really stupid sprinkling my dust on hyper-fattening and greasy food. I do it, but it’s like ordering a diet soda with your super-size meal, you blush. Consequently I think twice about what I’m eating and I try to do better. This does NOT make me feel deprived.
2. When you sprinkle, you think about the food, the portion and what you’re aiming for, which is satiety.
3. You start with smaller portions and you are willing to give it a minute to see if that satisfies.

Am I concerned about the ingredients? No so much. Honestly, how worried are you about the crap in fast food, snacks and other trash-food? It always cracks me up about any diet program when they advise “consult a doctor before beginning any diet or exercise program.” It’s SO much healthier to lie around getting no exercise and eating stuff out of cellophane and paper, do you get a doctor to sign off on that?

At any rate, there’s only so much I’m willing to do anymore. I’m not willing to make a dramatic change in my diet. I’m not willing to increase my level of exercise. I’m not willing to buy into the whole ‘thinner is better’ mentality.

It’s impossible to miss The Biggest Loser and Dr. Phil folks, who do make enormous lifestyle changes and reap giant rewards. First of all, that is HARD to do. I wonder how tenuous their weight-loss is. Is it an ingrained change, or is it as hard for them to maintain as it is for me to stay away from sugar?

In our culture, maintaining weight-loss is a Sisyphysian task. Gain ground, lose it again. Having big success and then having big failure not only tears up your emotions, but it’s hard on your body as well.

In the 70’s there was a movement called EST. The crux of the program was that you’d sit in a room staring into a strawberry until you got “it.” Sometimes I feel like weight-loss is like that. One day a fat person just gets “it” and magically the weight melts off.

I notice that as the contestants on Biggest Loser and the Dr. Phil Weight Loss Challenge near their goals, they proclaim that they are changed and that once they got “it” that it was easy to stick to their various plans. They also claim that they’ll never go back to their old ways.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these televised shows require the participants to drop out of their lives to participate in the intensive diet, exercise and behavior modification programs. Food and overeating is so culturally ingrained that you have to be removed from your normal environment just to make these vast changes.

I guess the big questions are: Can you lose weight without making enormous life changes? Can you maintain these changes outside of the intensive weight-loss environment?

Let’s look at the facts. Some people who undergo bariatric surgery manage to eat around it and gain their weight back. Some people who suffer an injury can alter their workout programs but are an accident away from gaining it all back.

Having the knowledge isn’t enough. There are so many ways that we are sabotaged in weight loss and weight maintenance, culturally, physiologically, psychologically, environmentally, that there has to be a magical component, otherwise it is so difficult that it is statistically impossible to achieve.

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Sensa is a non-FDA approved diet aid that you sprinkle on your food. There is no information available at this time as to what it is made from.

________________

From Ruthless_Bunny:

My Sensa came in the mail on Saturday and I opened the small box and inspected the contents. Two shakers, one for home, one for my purse, a booklet and a CD.

I read the booklet and popped in the CD. What’s weird about Sensa is that there’s no big mystery, so the booklet and the CD are pretty short. Basically sprinkle the stuff on your food and you’ll eat less. That’s it.

What I like about is that I don’t have to do any weird dietary stuff. As a person with a compulsive eating disorder (for which I have been in treatment for two-years) anything that focuses on food is a bad thing.

I have done every diet out there, probably twice. If any of them worked, I’d be at my optimal weight (notice I didn’t say thin, I don’t think I have the genetic makeup to be thin.) I have a combination of learned behavior, chemical imbalance and just plain addiction that I cannot control on my own.

The best thing that ever worked for me was Phen-fen. What I liked was that I completely forgot about food. I’d eat my meals, but have absolutely NO fixations on food at all. I remember I bought some ice cream and had it in the freezer and I didn’t eat it for days. Just didn’t want it and it didn’t bother me to leave it alone. But some people had problems and the government took it off the market. I gained back 70 pounds. That’s a lot of weight.

I have done a LOT of work on my compulsions, my emotional eating, food triggers and all the things that conspire to keep me fat.

My goal here is to slowly lose weight and control my desire to eat, even after I’ve stopped being hungry. I want to appreciate and honor food, I don’t think driving thru and scarfing it out of a paper bag in the car does that.

I gave up sugar for Lent mostly because it coincided with starting my job and they don’t know how much candy, cake, cookies and crap I can eat. I’m pretty certain that just foregoing sugary crap will aid tremendously. I have to say though that stopping sugar is a real withdrawal. Just like smoking or heroin. I had headaches, fantasies and dreams where I’d be eating huge slabs of chocolate cake. I’ve also stopped eating ANYTHING sweet, no sugar-free stuff, because it just triggers the triggers, so to speak.

What I’ve noticed with the Sensa is that it does intensify the flavor of food. Or I’m completely suggestible. I also I do notice that I stop sooner and eat less. I’m making better choices. More fruit and veggies, less fast food.

The Sensa folks don’t suggest a diet or an exercise regime, what I like about that is that they give me credit for having good common sense. I am sure that no one is fat due to ignorance of what makes them fat. We are fat because of internal and external issues and if we want to lose weight we have to address all the different issues.

With the Sensa I am addressing the satiety issues. That’s it. I have no more illusions than that.

I will say that I heartily recommend Paul McKenna’s book, I Can Make You Thin.
He’s a British hypnotherapist and he goes through some exercises in the book that have helped me give up sugar, stop craving chocolate and give me a method for stopping fixating on food as a soother for stress. You can get it on Amazon and it comes with a guided meditation disc.

I’m looking for tools, not for a miracle cure. I believe that Sensa is a tool.

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While you can start with kind and gentle yoga or simple walking, if you want to move forward you need to start small and work on increasing your range of motion. It’s a positive cycle: improve your range of motion, increase your activity and find where you need to increase your range of motion, and keep going gradually and gently expanding what your body is able to do.

One thing I’ve discovered is that weight-lifting MUST be paired with stretching – you can increase muscle strength and lose flexibility if you don’t stretch extra.

I do this by going through a series of daily stretches and gently increased activity. Many of the plus size exercise DVDs on the markets are modified slightly, but work about as well as the beginners – it’s worth exploring them at your own pace to find what works for you.

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In case you missed it, the social networking theory that obesity can be spread just by knowing and being friends with obese people has been thoroughly debunked.

In the ever well-done Junkfood Science blog, Sandy Szwarc said  “A social networking theory of contagious chin dimples might have been understood as implausible, but not so of obesity.”

The new study put together a series of probably conditions – and indeed, having acne and being tall can NOT spread via Facebook.

I could go on a “what the hell is wrong with people?” rant here, but it wouldn’t really contribute to the conversation. The reality is is that fat is not catching, and while the social factors of food are embedded into shaping culture itself, sitting next to your chubby aunt will not make your butt spread so it can reach over to say hello.

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Work out at workBy Michelle BruchStaffing firm Salo keeps employees movingIf your working life is spent in front of a computer screen, you can hardly be blamed for gaining a few extra pounds over the course of your career.Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist based at the Mayo Clinic, points to sitting as an important culprit of weight gain. His research has found that obese individuals tend to sit two-and-a-half more hours per day than lean people.So what’s a Downtown office worker to do?Salo LLC, a professional staffing firm based at 13th Street & Harmon Avenue, has taken Levine’s research to heart and installed over a dozen treadmill desks in its office. The $6,000 setup looks like a standard treadmill that is outfitted with an adjustable countertop. There’s a phone jack for a headset and a computer attached to the table. Employees can pull up their home computer’s desktop right at the walking workstation.

Downtown Journal : stories

I’ve voiced my contention before that a lot of the perceived “obesity crisis” is directly attributable to conditions in the very workplaces that are trying to reign in their healthcare costs. This solution by a Minneapolis firm is brilliant – since corporate work frequently takes up the bulk of time in the day, they’ve found a way to include exercise in the workplace – and it’s increased productivity.

Brilliant.

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