Supplementary Expenses

When someone notices my sixteen-pounds-and-counting weight loss, they always want to know how I’m doing it. After they find out, they often have a suggestion of something I should take to help the mission along, or replenish a missing mineral/vitamin/acid, which they can apparently tell I need despite no medical training or test results. 

Perhaps like me, you have a cupboard of shame, containing half-used bottles of things like coffee bean extract and hoodia. Some people have had success with these approaches. Some people need drastic measures and near-starvation in order to stick to a plan. But I happen to know for a fact that some of the diet giants fill bottles with ten cents worth of herbs and sell them to clients for $20-$30. The herbs are next to useless however they provide a psycological benefit. The client feels as if they’re doing something a little extra to help them lose weight.

And now it’s cleanses. Four people I know through Facebook have contacted me to push Isagenix cleanses and meal replacement shakes my way. I’m adamantly against doing cleanses after speaking with transplant specialists following the liver damage I experienced from my bout with severe sepsis. Essentially, those experts say the anti-toxic benefits and other claims are – forgive the medical terminology – bullshit. While they boast of “supporting the liver” and “flushing out the system”, they do nothing more medicinal for you than you would get from taking a few squares of Ex-lax.

But I digress.

I don’t mind a meal replacement once in a while but let’s not call it a healthy choice, shall we? The bars and shake powders are fake foods. They’ve been processed in factories just like any fatty sausage or salty snack. I sometimes replace lunch with a Nutribar when I’m craving a chocolate fix. But I couldn’t do it every day.

Since I started my first Weight Watchers diet in my teens, I’ve gained and lost the equivelant of John Goodman. It gets so much harder to take it off and keep it off as you get older. In my experience, it has to come with a lifestyle change, and when I moved to London, I knowingly and consciously went off that lifestyle and stuffed too many treats and too-big portions into my gob to slowly grow to my highest weight ever. Still, it took a terrible photograph earlier this year to startle me into taking action again, eating real food, with strict portion control and an emphasis on foliage and protein over carbs. I believe the transition to maintaining the weight will be easier if I’m allowed to eat the things I love, in smaller amounts. Well, not all of the things I love. I dream of running in slow-mo through a field of daisies toward a bag of chocolate covered almonds where we embrace, and then they willingly submit to being consumed.

I don’t have all the answers. And I’m taking it day by day because I’m not at my goal yet. If bee pollen or raspberry keytones or a mouthful of cider vinegar helped your cousin take off 40 pounds in 3 days, good for them. What I need more than anything is support and cheerleading, to keep up my resilience. I’ve been here so many times before, although without quite as far to go. Nature wants a woman over 40 to develop a thick middle and a puffy behind. She’s supposed to stay back in the cave and watch the little ones while the younger adults go out to hunt. After all, at 40, her life is almost over. I’m choosing to fight nature with nature, that’s all.