Week 32 Progress Report: Dealing with Skin Sag; or, Rewriting the Food Script

I broke away in the middle of writing this report to empty out, clean, and spray down the pantry with bug spray, a task that took a little longer than I expected … like 11 hours. Anyway, here are the box scores from yesterday’s weigh-in:

Starting Weight:	233.0
Original Target*:	245.0
Adjusted Target:	231.2
Actual Weight:	230.0
Loss/Gain:	– 3.0
Total Loss:	72.6
% of Goal:	52.4%
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 2.3
*Original target calculated from a starting weight of 302.6 lbs. and an average loss/wk. of 1.8 lbs.

Although I finished slightly above the plan month target line, when you plan for only slightly less than two pounds a week, a three-pound drop is nothing to sneer at. In fact, the number reflects a bounce up from Sunday (229.4 lbs.), which was significantly below the line. The chicken parmesan, made by Your Humble Writer, was worth it. And today, yesterday’s hard work resulted in a 0.8-lb. drop, even after finishing the day with a bag of popcorn with some nutritionally horrific butter oil added to it. Je ne regrette rien.

Of course, having lost so much weight in a comparatively little time — about 7½ months to lose what I gained over about seven years — I notice that some areas, particularly around my torso, are “sagging, bagging, and dragging,” as I heard Dolly Parton once put it. Your skin isn’t like a rubber band to begin with. And years of processed foods, smoking, and not drinking enough water, not to mention the slow surrender of a middle-aged body to Time, have reduced my skin’s elasticity.

Well, I’m not Ms. Dolly, so I don’t have the money to have things “nipped, tucked, sucked, and stuck someplace else.” Besides, the body is a closed system and meant to be a closed system; surgical interventions, no matter how minor, should be pursued only when medically necessary. (That includes boob and butt jobs, 99% of which aren’t medically necessary.) That’s why I decided not to use bariatric surgery for weight loss if I could dump the weight by changing my eating habits. Indulging one’s vanity is not a medical necessity, no matter how you … er, slice it.

I’m a technology skeptic. By that, I don’t mean I’m a Luddite — I don’t hate technology or refuse to use it (obviously, since you’re reading this blog). I mean that I recognize the many benefits the last couple hundred years of technological innovation have brought have come at a cost to our environment, our society, and our mores that we have yet to fully calculate. And there are still many, many people out there who still believe at least subconsciously in “Man’s conquest of Nature”, which was ever a product of modern man’s hubris.

Besides, the physical, emotional, and moral quality of our lives is more important than the length of it. As in the parable of the Rich Fool, tonight your soul may be demanded of you (Luke 12:20); there’s no shutting off the mortality gene. What are you doing today to make your life count for something? If 70 or 80 years isn’t long enough for you to do the things you think would make a fully engaged and meaningful life, you need to change the way you live, not the length you live.

Nevertheless, I’m still vain enough that having skin sag, bulge, and jiggle as it surrenders to gravity depresses me. The most commonsense solution I found was in a blog by certified trainer and nutritionist Erika Nicole Kendall called A Black Girl’s Guide to Weight Loss. Erika’s target audience may be African-American women, but the processes involved have nothing to do with either skin color or sex — they’re true of us all. (As a writer myself, I know defining your audience helps you to reach them by shaping your language to fit that audience. I’m just saying you can find out a lot of interesting and useful things if you keep an open mind and don’t let labels throw you off.)

Let me quote a paragraph that really struck me:

When you merely add fresh produce to an otherwise questionable diet, you’re still fighting the negative effects of the questionable diet. Hyper-processed foods with certain chemicals — and chemical combinations — have a tendency to screw with your hormones, screw with your internal organs and their ability to adequately do their jobs, and can quite literally make you sick. Adding fresh produce to that kind of diet while still consuming processed food isn’t going to let the fresh produce do repair work of fixing what the processed food screws up. Instead, the fresh produce will only fight to keep things from getting worse. Very little progress towards better health can be made in this kind of situation. …

There is more to weight loss than food, ... but there is more to food than weight loss. [Italics in original]

Now, I’ve said before that comfort foods are the foods we used to eat as children; as such, they evoke memories of family, friends, love, and good times. They’re comfort food in the sense that they evoke all these warm fuzzies, but they’re also comfort food in that they’re what we’re used to eating. Experience and experimentation can expand that set of fallback meals, but they’re still what we fall back on when we’re too busy or not in the mood to be creative.

However, while some of the food our parents made for us is what their parents made for them, some of it — in fact, a lot — is not what their parents grew up on. People were trying to find new ways to increase the shelf life of food since at least the late 18th century, when Nicholas Appert began experimenting with sealed glass jars to start the canning process. Processed foods have only been in the market since just before World War I. If your great-great-grandparents grew up before then, odds are they never ate mayonnaise as children, let alone bought it in the grocery store. Trans fats were developed in the 1890s; only in the last couple of decades have they become a source of concern. Chemical additives, preservatives, and artificial sweeteners are post-World War II developments.

Over the same period of time, our economy has changed drastically, from a predominantly agricultural and manufacturing society to a predominantly service-based economy in which both agriculture and industrial manufacturing jobs occupy a much smaller percentage of the population. We are increasingly a nation of office workers and drivers, doing jobs that require less and less physical effort as business owners try to find more technological ways to save labor and reduce their payrolls. We don’t need to eat like farmers, miners, and factory workers. If you’re an office worker and a couch potato, you don’t need to eat like you’re a ranch hand or a professional basketball player.

Over the last century, then, the food industry has corrupted increasingly inappropriate food scripts with innovations created out of nutritional ignorance and the desire to find new ways to squeeze money out of people’s wallets. (A script, in this context, is a cultural pattern of expected behavior which we learn subconsciously from family, peers, and our social environment.) Simply reducing the amount of food we eat isn’t going to undo all the damage that technological innovations have done and are still doing to our bodies. Neither are expensive topical creams or compression clothing going to do from the outside what your body isn’t doing from the inside.

We have to get out of our comfort zones and create new ones. We have to rewrite our food scripts.

Cutting out processed sugars so far as possible is one thing you should be doing already. Cutting down refined carbohydrates and replacing them with whole-grain substitutes is another. The same thing with sodas and other sweetened drinks, whether diet or not — I confess that, although I’m drinking more water than I used to, I’ve been slow to cut the Coke Zero out. Caffeine has diuretic properties, meaning you pee more water than you keep. But coffee has some antioxidants, too, so if you can take it black, you can continue with it.

(Smoking, among its other wonderful properties, also reduces your skin’s ability to repair itself. However, I’m saving that effort for when I’ve reached my weight goal. Even Milo of Croton could only carry one bull at a time.)

However, to rewrite the food script, you have to change the foods you do eat. Learn how to prepare and eat more fresh or at least frozen fruits and vegetables, which means stop boiling your greens into fibrous masses of nutritional uselessness. (Only save canned fruits and vegetables for those occasions when you won’t have access to a grocery store for a long time, like a thermonuclear war.) Move to whole-grain breads and pastas. Avoid box dinners like Hamburger Helper and Kraft Macaroni ’n Cheese, and frozen junk food like chimichangas. As much as possible, move to clean or minimally-processed foods.

Having made all those changes, however, it’s still gonna take time for your skin to become more elastic, and it’s still gonna take more time before the sagging, bagging, and dragging areas start to conform to your body. I have bought a compression shirt to hold up the sagging areas, which is more for the sake of vanity than for any expected benefit. Erika also suggests compression pants and, for the ladies, either a sports bra or at least a comfortable bra (“no sitting high and pretty”).

And then, wait for your skin to catch up. It will catch up eventually. If you’re willing to invest the time you need to lose the weight, you should be willing to invest the time you need for your skin to fit your new body, right?