Recently, I came across a clip of a young boy doing a mukbang with his grandmother on YouTube. During that clip he declared it’s big back season. Indeed it is.
I’m not sure when the term “big back” got popularized and infused into the culture. Even though I sometimes use it, I’m a bit ambivalent towards the phrase given that I find it funny, but also feel attacked at the same damn time.
This time of year, from Thanksgiving through the end of the year is when I often gain weight…like to the tune of 10 pounds perennially. So it’s scary.
But I’m sorry, I’m not depriving myself of all the yummy treats that go hand and hand with the holidays. I would even go as far to say, some foods are worth being fat. Of course I say that as a plus-sized woman who has no idea what it’s like to wear clothes in the single digits, so there’s that.
Single digits, however, for me are the goal. I remember a long time ago – perhaps I was still in high school, maybe a bit older – I was watching one of those news magazine shows, something like 20/20, and they were interviewing these women, all in the same family I think, that lost a lot of weight. I don’t remember the question that was asked, but one of them said, “no food tastes as good and thin feels.”
I have a feeling she’s right. I must admit, a strong part of my desire to lose weight is to see what I would look at as single-digit size. I didn’t experience it in my teens or twenties, thirties and now forties. I be thinkin’ to myself I better make an effort at it now while I steal can.
But the thing that I’m after even more than how I look is how I feel – not just being smaller, but being healthy. I’m pretty healthy now – thank, God. The older I get, the more things like that are important to me. I realize that the older I get, things like health don’t come as easily. For me, the effects of a bad diet actually started pretty early. For me it started in my thirties.
I grew up eating pints of ice cream. I remember my mom, my sister and I used to go to the liquor store not too far from our house and get a pint of Haagen Dazs ice cream each. I would get cookies and cream, or this vanilla and raspberry sherbert swirl flavor they used to have, or sometimes I’d get the vanilla and orange swirl one. My mom always got the butter pecan. I can’t remember the kind my sister used to get. I think back a pint was like $2, but anyway. Eventually I switched to strawberry cheesecake Haagen Daz, before I discovered Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough around 9th grade, and that became my flavor of choice. But my point is, I could eat that whole pint of ice cream, no problem. I didn’t feel bad afterwards, I didn’t feel sluggish. I just ate and was merry. I could do that all through my teens and twenties. But somewhere around 30, eating a pint of ice cream in a single sitting left me feeling sluggish, left me with low energy, sometimes even feeling sick. It was like immediately upon finishing the pint, I could feel the bad effects of whatever it is in that ice cream that’s not good for me. And that has continued ever since then. Now I must admit that I don’t always feel that way after eating a pint of ice cream. And interestingly enough, now in my forties, I don’t feel that way as much as I did in my thirties, but it does come back from time to time. If for no other reason, all though we there are definitely other reasons, for this reason alone I have to be mindful when I indulge.
Besides the optical aspect of it, I also want to be fit. I want to have the energy and the strength to carry on with life like I always have and not be encumbered by a hurt leg, a broken hip, weak lungs or whatever it is that stops one from making it up a flight of stairs without heaving. I don’t want shit like that to be part of my experience.
That feeling you get when you know you’ve eaten too much – that lethargic, sluggish, tired, don’t feel like doing anything, stomach a bit upset feeling – that’s what I want to avoid as much as possible.
More often than not, I want to feel like I do after a workout, when I feel like I could run for miles and leap and touch the sky. Even though, for the record, I have never ran a mile.
Recently, I saw another video on YouTube that caught my attention. This one was a short and the thumbnail showed people working out in a cycling class. I was like, let me click on this and see what it’s about. The video played and I was mesmerized. Take a look and see what I mean:
Now as for me in my current state, I would’ve been one of those people sitting it out on the side. Who knows how long they were going on before they tuckered out. At that level of intensity, I’d give myself…I’ll be generous and say five minutes. But I would love to be able to keep up with that front line. I would love to be that fit, to have that much energy.
In the meantime I’ll just have to start where I’m at. Since it’s the holiday season, aka big back season, I’ve devised a plan to indulge in my favorite treats, while also not neglecting my health and fitness, thus hopefully avoiding the perennial 10 pounds I usually put on around this time of year.
And it goes a little something like this…
Thanksgiving week: I told myself I could indulge and indulge I did. I had a pumpkin danish, a slice of carrot cake, although both of those were pretty small. Then I turned around and had practically a whole pecan pie – only one slice was missing. I also had about three slices of pumpkin pie (we usually eat sweet potato, but this was a last-minute Thanksgiving day buy).
The First Week of December: The pecan pie was so good I craved another. This time I had a half of a pecan pie – spread over yesterday and today – with some butter pecan ice cream. I may afford myself one more indulgence by Saturday, before I cut myself off.
December 7th through the 23rd: The goal is to cut myself off of sweets and unhealthy fast food completely and stock up on fruits and veggies. Possibly do a couple of juice cleanses before Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve through January 1st: It’s time to indulge again. I’ll pretty much eat what I want. Then, beginning January 2, I’ll go down to indulging just once a week and work my way up to twice a month, and hopefully once a month.
The goal is to accompany this with daily exercising. So far, I exercise about every two to three days.
I’ve lost around 20 pounds in the last three months. I’m not sure of the exact number because my scale is broken and needs to be replaced. There’s nothing like losing weight to give you the momentum you need to keep losing weight.
Oh, and something else I think also helps is getting rid of clothes when they become loose. I have a theory. I have never worn a size larger than 18. That’s not to say that I haven’t been bigger than an 18. Earlier this year when I was 255 pounds, I’m pretty sure I was a size 20, but I’ve never purchased size twenty clothes. I just kept wearing my old size 18 clothes or extra long clothes. And the thing about clothes is, especially if they have a little stretch in them, they stretch with you. This can trick you into believing your smaller than you really are
But also, when my size 18s get too tight, that’s what clues me into to lose weight. When my size 18s get to tight, that’s when I know I don’t want to get any bigger and I make an extra effort to get my weight down – at least so I can fit into my 18s comfortably.
But I wonder, what if I did purchase the size 20, would I have grown bigger in them? And too, every time my size 18s get too tight and I lose the weight, I never get rid of my size 18s. I just keep wearing them along with my size 16s, and eventually I outgrow the 16s and the 18s are already there for me.
So my theory is, what if I get rid of the size 18s as soon as I can comfortably fit into the 16s. Then get rid of the 16s as soon as I can fit comfortably into the 14s and so on?
I think there just may be something to getting rid of the bigger clothes once they’re too big that may make a difference. This time I’m going to try it and see.
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