Teenage IF and Nothing Left to Lose

Insanity is relative.

Insanity is MY relatives. Let's talk about the teen.

Ry is 16 years old now. She is amazing, awesome, beautiful, and also miserably infuriating, and capable of making me want to rage, weep, despair, and implode with love, within any 15 minute time-span.

My parenting sucks. I need to work on being much more disciplined with her; she is horribly inconsiderate of me in so many ways, that 'entitlement psychology' that drives me mad.

A lot of it really IS 'energy' issues on my part.  When you barely have the energy to get up and pee, never mind take a shower or drive to the store, then having the energy to fight with your teenager (and constantly get up and stalk them to make sure they do stuff and nag them for the 1.2 billion things they screw up or half-ass do) is easier said than done. But, I know it is what it is. My not feeling particularly up to it most of the time does not excuse me from being responsible for it.

Sometimes I get so angry and everything about her behavior just seems so wrong. One day, in the middle of ranting at her about something I can't even recall, I remembered the lyrics to a Linkin Park song I like -- archetypal teenage angst. The lyrics, made succinct here:

Tired of being what you want me to be
Feeling so faithless, lost under the surface
Don't know what you're expecting of me
Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
Can't you see that you're smothering me
Holding too tightly afraid to lose control
Cause everything that you thought I would be
Has fallen apart right in front of you
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
And every second I waste is more than I can take
Caught in the undertow just caught in the undertow
And I know I may end up failing too
But I know you were just like me
With someone disappointed in you
I've become so numb I can't feel you there
Become so tired so much more aware
I'm becoming this all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you

-- 'Numb' by Linkin Park 

And I realized that what I really wanted to do was shake her while yelling, "Be more like ME dammit!"

At that point, I realized the black humor of it all.

Teenage Fat and Self Esteem

She has fought obesity, eventually to morbid obesity. I can't take back the past and my own ignorance and thinking that a lot of stuff was "not a big deal," and thinking that my inability to lose weight in the areas that turn out to define 'Lipoedema' and my inability to handle carbs without weight gain was unique to me. Like I was some alien circus creature and surely "everyone else" wasn't that way. After all, I was surrounded by people who ate 10x worse than I did and they were normal, or at least much smaller. So much for that logic. Some of them are now huge.

I didn't get fat until my early 20s. I had a little chub that hit hard and fast at 13, but it fell off me when I hit 15, 'baby fat' they called it. And she seemed to have more her father's body shape and coloring than mine. So I never expected it of her. By the time it was overwhelmingly obvious that something had gone wildly wrong in her metabolism, she was a pre-teen and the damage was done.

Our house was already mostly low-carb and mostly gluten-free by then. At that point it was more a matter of  wanting to support her and let food focus be her own decision. Wanting to NOT be like mothers of my friends, who told me that their own mom's response to their weight when young was far more horrifying than the weight itself. I told her everything I could about low-carb but how too much of that for me had been an issue so maybe it should be moderated; about emphasis on fresh foods, good fats like coconut oil, and lifting weights. Basically, the things I was reading about at any given time.

That doesn't mean that she has been able to do something successfully before now. Or be willing to do something even 'with me', even when I was willing just for the sake of helping her. It has to come from her, I have learned that the hard way.

To say that the effects of fat on her self esteem are radical is an understatement.

It has been hard for me to understand. By comparison, I was a fairly confident, slightly intellectual, barely-starting martial arts enthusiast, a manager in my workplaces from the time I began working, and a performing artist since I was a child. It turns out I am more an introvert than I realized (when I got to know myself, my psych rating changed from ENTJ to INTP/J). But she is none of that.

She really is nothing like me in many ways.

When I was around 24 and suddenly the social world of strangers began treating me like some especially gross gum on the bottom of their shoe, I was at first perplexed (how could anybody not know that I was cool?), and then enraged (how could they have the gall to look down on me?) and then mortified (if I stand behind the column in this shopping mall for another 10 minutes, those women I used to know in high school will leave). That is to say... I dealt with it poorly.

But, once I got over nearly putting a bullet in my head about it, I was ok. I just focused on work. That's what dad said he did when his (now on #5) marriages went to hell. If you work enough, you don't have time to focus on, think about, anything else. And everyone you are around defines you primarily by your work, not by your weight, at least to some degree. So I became a workaholic.

I'm working normal hours now. Probably temporary. But I'm trying to focus on fiction writing which 'feeds my soul' in some fashion, in my personal time. Still, it's true I'm affected by my weight, psychologically and socially, but except in rare moments of angst, it's more in the background for me.

Not for her. It is up front and center for her.

I didn't deal with fat nearly as poorly as she did, in her own way, though. She got it when self-esteem was still developing. Fat has had an emotional and psychological impact on her that it never had on me, because I had long grown past formative years (including response from boys) when it arrived.

She claims shyness, and "a degree of social anxiety." I don't know what to believe, since the latter often seems to overlap with her not wanting to go anywhere or do anything and seems like a lazy-excuse. All I know is that she has been seriously harmed up by the situation, via more than just her figure.

Teenage Self-Imposed Dieting, Exercising, Intermittent Fasting

On her own, since she is in that "never comes out of her room" phase, she has shifted to a 'fairly low-carb' eating plan on her own, lifts weights, and works hard on practicing IF, or Intermittent Fasting.

Of course, she is 16. She is an artist (impressively so), which to my Virgo x4 logical mind appears to translate in our lives as "never does anything properly, won't study anything thoroughly, makes a mess of every environment, and is the laziest human alive."  I think work and study are The Answer(tm). Clearly, she doesn't. So, getting her to "do these things right" and "truly understand them" is a lost cause.

She does "something" and she's not particularly consistent and she's not particularly severe about it.

But, I'm one of those people who was consistent and severe and ended up with seemingly new problems thanks to 'overdoing' VLC and 'underdoing' rich-nutrition, I suspect. So, it's possible that her doing it "mostly" and screwing it up "to a degree and sometimes" is actually the far-healthier approach!

1. She eats lowish carb. Except when she doesn't. Mostly she tries to keep her carbs to vegetables, legumes, and rarely fruits, and what comes in certain dairy.
2. She eats high fat. That is to say she eats to satiation, and is directly responsible for increasing stock prices in the Daisy Dairy company for their cottage cheese and sour cream products.
3. She eats meat as the base of any meal.  
4. She tries to eat once a day, as much as she can, until she is totally full. She may blow it and have a protein shake or something else very LC in the middle of that sometimes. Once a week, she tries to fast for 30 hours instead of 24.
5. When she can gather up the gumption, she does the lifts I have insisted are the foundation of fitness: we don't have a bench and she's using only dumbbells, so: deadlifts, squats, arnold press, and then some messing-around things (e.g. side bends, shoulder shrugs, calf raises). 

At least, she tells me she is doing this, and that this is why my weights are not in the living room where I want them to be. Since she is holed up in her room like a train robber evading the posse, I will have to take her word on it.

She has lost from around 283# to 240#. (She is 5'6".) She's excited about that, but it's been a bit slow going, probably because she probably has too many calories when lowcarb, and too many carbs when normal on calories, and she is likely seldom if ever truly ketogenic, due to not retaining the <35g carbs daily for long enough to get there more than the tiny dip during sleep or something.

Still, it is a very visible improvement all over her body, and she's so hopeful. The more I read about how weight regain is nearly inevitable and so on, the more when I think of her I feel an incredible rage. I want her to have a life and be proud of herself and feel good. She is young. Surely if there is hope for anybody truly losing it and being able to keep it off, it ought to be her.

Food and Stuff

I had cans of white meat chicken that I store for emergencies, quick protein and kitty treat. Now I can't keep the stuff. She's discovered if she drains it, and fries it with spices, it becomes a diced/flaked chicken she can mix with lots of other things, eat plain, put in salads, whatever. It's surprisingly good.

It's this stuff. At amazon if you buy the 10oz can, 12pk, on subscribe with prime, it's basically the same price as Super Walmart. Except they deliver it to your door.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000V1LXTU/

Initially I thought, I'm not fond of this as her primary food, since I am prejudiced against canned food, and it's expensive as hell for me as a 'primary' food, and surely fresh chicken is better. But she doesn't want to cook quite that much if she doesn't have to. So she's living on canned chicken, ground (organic) turkey burger, and (factory) chuck-burger, along with enough 'soft-dairy' for a Vermont advertising model.

She's fond of the Greek seasoning I get her from Penzey's, and herbed crumbled feta cheese. She likes basic italian seasonings, and Montreal steak seasoning.  She still doesn't like eggs, but she doesn't mind them "in" things. She uses canned diced green chilis, and sliced black olives, both in large quantity. And shredded mild cheddar cheese... and she never met anything that cream cheese didn't make better. Sometimes turkey pastrami sliced at the grocer deli. She's getting more courageous experimenting with spices.

She drinks only water, since she says she can guarantee a facial zit for every few drinks of any soda, almost predictably. She eats salads with ranch dressing sometimes. That's about all I can think to say about her eating since I don't actually SEE most of it. I have to work 9-10 hours a day, and sleep, and some computer stuff, which means the only time I might actually be sharing her life in the early evening, she is usually locked away in her room, playing WoW or SIMS or drawing.

But it's working for her...

She's losing weight. She's measurably smaller. She feels optimistic about it.

And if she does every individual thing not so well to begin with, and blows it entirely off and on, well it might be that this actually does her more help than harm in the end.

Because what she's doing is working. She had almost given up hope. She felt desperate and demoralized. She felt like she had nothing left to lose. Now she feels better.

I consider this a great thing.

PJ

The 10,000 Ways That Don't Work

I've worked 20 hours a day, 7 days a week from last December 9 to May. I worked more like 16/6.5 since then. Starting just at the beginning of November, a bit over a week ago, I have actually been taking time off. I've had 1.5 weekends entirely off now, and 1.5 days (Wednesdays) entirely off now. I've gotten more sleep in the last 10 days than I have gotten in any 30-40 days in about a year.

This has led to the understanding that if you sleep 3 hours a night, you are not going to lose weight, for several good reasons.

I was re-reading my blog, like a 5-year review. I summarized many of the best/worst things I have done since I began this journey:

Teenage Low Carb, Part 2

"Why is there no cream cheese?"
"I dunno."
"Did you eat all the cream cheese?"
"I don't remember."
"Well who did??"
"I dunno."
"There are only two of us living here! It wasn't me. So..."
"I was hungry!"
"You're always hungry!"
"Yes! I am! So what!"

It's the Mystery of The Disappearing Yummy Foods.

Now, Regina Wilshire once counseled me: Don't deprive a growing child of nutrient-foods; their body drives them to intake nutrients so they have what they need to grow. They need to have free access to the healthy foods so they can eat as needed.

I agree that seems like a sound philosophy.

But what do you do when the growing child only wants to eat all the peanut butter and cream cheese and any possible yummy snack (even homemade LC stuff), instead? In the night? Without mentioning it?

Teenage Low-Carb, Part 1

Most people have a fairly difficult time getting, and staying, on an eating plan that is significantly different than what they grew up with. Or, an eating plan that requires major changes to the lifestyle they hold. Even for adults, those "in control of" the money and food and cooking, there are many issues.

And then there's having a teenager!  gah!

The way I see it, the issues fall into different categories. For example:

Teenage Low-Carb

I'm going to be posting, over the next week, a several-post series summarizing what I have learned, experienced, still struggle with, and have accomplished, in regards to my 13 year old daughter and our whole-foods, gluten-free, low-carb lifestyle.

Basically, a sort of bullet point and narrative summary of our ongoing attempt to improve nutrition, feel better, and reduce body fat, but specific to the issues that relate to her.

If there are any specific questions feel welcome to post 'em in the comments section and I'll include that topic in the posts.

More soon!
PJ

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Teen-age Low-Carb: 90% Angst, 10% Protein

My beautiful little drama queen turns 13 on the 13th of this month. We are both treating this birthday as A Really Big Deal™ for her 'coming of age'.

I'm spending way too much money on her. And we are going on our first-ever 'vacation' together, two weekend days in Joplin MO, a city an hour away that more closely approximates "civilization" than our own small city, where we're going to stay in a hotel, take long baths, use their jacuzzi, and eat at all the wonderful places we have not visited in over a YEAR now -- like Outback, Olive Garden, etc.

Yes, that means that basically the day we celebrate one full month fully back on VLC, is the day her birthday cake (another special request from her) arrives and we begin four days of intentional off-plan eating. My mind already has lectures pre-made and in the can regarding this, so never mind. Here's hoping it is not difficult to get fully back on the wagon again afterward.

**

I was not fat as a child. When I look at pictures, I see that at age 7-8 I had chubby little knees in my Brownies uniform but that seemed pretty normal and was shortly gone. Around age 13 in part due to circumstance (trapped in a tiny house in steaming heat with no A/C and a fridge/freezer of ice cream junk food, for 2 months), I gained some weight again but by 15 if not sooner that was gone, and by 16 I was thinner than I'd been since age 12. Age 18-20 I could have lost 10-15#, but was pretty fit despite that and feared no bikini despite that.

(I was a waitress in a 24/7 beach hotel/restaurant when I was 18-19, working the graveyard ("bar rush" at 2am) shift. All the others were much older women by 20-40 years. They gave me major grief about how my nurses's white uniform dress (with that frilly little black apron!) was far too long. I thought I had knobby knees and was shy. They gave me SUCH grief about it that finally one day I lost my temper, went home and hemmed that damn dress so short that every time I reached up to the lighted pie shelf the entire restaurant got a free show. My tips went up dramatically and immediately, was the interesting part. I probably would have done it sooner if I'd have known!)

I always had a real waist so the extra flesh in my hips and breasts just made me look very curvy. Maybe age 20-22 I probably could have lost about 20-25#, but it still wasn't much of an issue for me; 5'6" and I carry weight well (though at this point it's vastly too much weight to do so of course). I didn't get actually FAT until the 22-24 age. After which I was suddenly 200# overweight.

But the kid started gaining weight around age 8. It didn't actually seem like a big deal at first; she was starting to add chub at the same age that I had, after all, and mine had vanished.

But by the time she was 10, it hadn't vanished, it had just gotten worse. I was ambivalent, because I have friends who were fat as children, and they said that the misery at school couldn't compare with the horror of their mother, the one person who is supposed to love them unconditionally, being totally judgemental about it, often showing the same disgust and scorn and demeaning attitude that society brainwashes nearly everybody into. In this fat-phobic, ultra-prejudiced society, your child's fat reflects on you. The more insecure the mother, the more fanatic they get about making the kid live on disgusting food or half-starvation to try and force them into 'normal'. Sure there is lots of talk about health and the child's happiness but in my opinion, mothers who behave like that which I have heard about or met personally, have been a lot more about "don't make me look bad by proxy" than anything else.

So before every other consideration, I was determined that my little girl was going to feel unconditionally loved and always beautiful to mom. So initially, although SHE had begun really griping about her weight, I never said anything more than "I think you're beautiful" and "well sweetie I like you fine but if you want to change that, I can help you work on it." Eventually she took me up on that and I put her on low-carb with me.

She lost 5 pants sizes and was very happy!

She disliked the eating plan though, and once she was a good size again, got more and more obnoxious about staying on it. I was really trying to find and make food she would find versatile and interesting, to no avail. Her griping about the food and what she wanted and I wouldn't make, got so ridiculous that every single meal became a major drama. I started getting angry repeatedly, from frustration and sometimes impatience and hurt feelings.

After awhile, it became evident that this was not merely a dissatisfaction with food; it had become THE CONTROL ISSUE in our relationship. I really hate the chronic-trauma that teen angst can add to a parent's life; I have enough cortisol/stress issues in my life already without every meal becoming a war zone. I didn't escape a miserable childhood especially related to food, only to have more chronic misery around it as an adult.

Finally after talking with friends, I concluded that they were right: she was old enough that the bottom line was, she had to WANT to do it. I finally got fed up and burned out on it and said fine. And we ate 'normal' food -- per the Standard American Diet (SAD) -- instead of Low Carb for quite some time.

And she promptly gained the weight back. And more. And then she started her menses and suddenly and dramatically gained a lot more to add to it in a pretty short time. Stretch marks everywhere, poor baby. Finally she wanted to go back on lowcarb with me. I shrugged it off until she DEMANDED we go on lowcarb. And then I told her "only" if she'd quit "being that way" about the food, and eat what I gave her. She was desperate and promised.

I agreed that we would take Friday evening through Sunday evening off-plan for her party and our vacation on the condition she agreed we would be on meat&egg for several days afterward.

What we've been doing so far (the last month) hasn't been working really. I carry, at my current weight, about 25# of water weight. (It used to be more.) I've lost about half of it is all. She's lost about 7#. Yes I know that 13# and 7# in a month don't sound bad at all but at the start of LC when the water weight is supposed to come off, it should be more, particularly for me.

I've tried to consider what we've been eating. Lowcarb 'flat-out' wraps have a lot of gluten. And we've had deli meats a lot which probably have a lot of sodium. We've greatly reduced our diet soda intake, sometimes with iced tea and sometimes with water. We've had a couple lowcarb treats and a couple lowcarb pancake experiments, but we have lived almost entirely on chicken dishes and plain hamburger patties for the last month. I'm disappointed we have not lost any 'real' weight (non-water weight). Perhaps our calories are actually too low.

When her birthday-fest is over, I thought I should make a vastly bigger effort to ditch the gluten wraps and deli meats. Maybe that will help at least with losing the last of the bloating. I've never had it take so long for the water weight to fall off me. (It's not just an assumption based on the scale. There are parts of my body I know well and know what they are like when I'm fully LC.)

Finding foods that she can eat 'as much as she wants of' is the hard part. She isn't a huge meat fan really; she can put up with chicken and burgers but not much of anything else and she isn't that fond of those. She doesn't like eggs unless buried "in" something. And anything with carbs (even peas or cheese) she could eat almost without stopping and really over-do bigtime.

It really is a problem when people (seemingly since near birth) seem to ONLY like sugar-based foods (carbs) and have no interest in anything else. That was my problem, and it's her problem.

She doesn't like many veggies; she does like peas (only if drowning in butter) and broccoli/cauli (only if drowning in cheese sauce) but aside from that she really only likes potatoes and sweet corn (drowning in butter). And every kind of grain known to man, of course.

It is just HELL trying to come up with stuff to EAT that she likes! Without eating the same things daily and burning out on them quickly. Without cooking stuff that takes tons of time.

Low-carb is hard enough with one person. With a second person who has radically different tastes and limited likes, it is really a lot more complicated.

And when the second person can make every meal into a dramatic multi-part play -- because that's just the way kids that age ARE -- it's just exhausting!

I get so weary. It makes it easier to go offplan because I just feel overwhelmed by it.

PJ
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Reverse Psychology and Low-Carb Parenting

As a single mom, I sometimes think that it doesn't matter what the subject under discussion is: whether we're talking about eating well, budgeting, or why my dang bedroom still isn't painted, the answer to the question "What is the factor of most difficulty in this situation?" is always "parenting".

For quite awhile I was pretty miserably depressed over my body having lost interest in losing weight, despite that I seemed to be eating fine. Then my eating got 'iffy at times', which didn't help, but if the result is "not losing weight" no matter what you do, it gets rather difficult to convince yourself that you really should eat 'meat' instead of 'everything else'. I lost interest in blogging here because I don't want to be a bad example. I lost heart in talking to my friends in a forum because I feel like a poser if I'm not "doing" what I'm talking about well-enough.

Me and the kid ("R") as you may recall from ancient history of this blog, were on lowcarb together for awhile. She lost 5 pants sizes and felt great and was very happy. She lost interest after that though, and the more I leaned on lowcarbing, the more every single meal became a drama-queen event. She is 12 going on 15, 'became a woman' a few months ago, and is SO hormonal it's hard not to pity her frankly. Puberty to mid-teens is like 5 years of solid PMS.

But it became such an issue I finally said, "Fine." and we went back to eating some of what we used to eat, spaghetti with meat sauce and other kinds of grains (thanks to gluten I could barely breathe), and a lot of junk, whatever was fast and near and cheap. At times, I made an effort to be LC myself despite this but I just felt depressed and the urges didn't last long.

I regained a little weight, not a ton but enough to annoy me. About 20#. More than that, but the rest is water weight that will be falling off me over the next few weeks if I'm eating low-carb, so I don't really count that as a weight loss accomplishment.

Over time she has really regained weight. She's also grown a few inches. Her hips and scale weight nearly made me keel over when we measured this morning. I didn't weigh that much until I was 23 and definitely overweight, and I'm a couple inches taller. I tried not to hyperventilate; I try to be casual with her. "Yeah, that's too much babe, we'll have to get that off you, ok." I want her to understand it's possible and believe in it and know she is responsible for not sabotaging her own eating plan and mine as well.

So over the last month she has mourned her size and talked about going back to eating lowcarb. I shrugged, I made it seem like something I didn't consider her seriously interested in so I wasn't either anymore. No more fights 3x a day at meals, no more having a hard enough time making food for ME to eat several times a day let alone her when "she won't eat meat or eggs." About a week ago she admitted that she'd never really disliked meat but was just mad and wanted 'other stuff'. But every time she has brought up something I've basically shrugged it off. Once I said, "Aw, well, I'm fat, I might as well get fatter, it's too much trouble to eat lowcarb." Heh.

Last night she insisted that we "return to lowcarb" today. "Mostly meat," she says. She is insisting also that we take vitamins and drink water, and she wants to exercise a little. Now she insists; it is HER decision and I MUST support her in this, she says!

I tried to be casual. Sure, ok.

I did not leap into the air yelling HALLELUJIAH THANK YOU JESUS YAY-UH! and happy-dance around the room.

Some days, the world goes ok.

PJ
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Low-Carb Drama Queens at All Ages

This post is going to be one of those posts that is embarrassingly honest, at the risk of making me -- and my kid -- significantly less "cool".

Even the lowcarb world has its own version of what is cool and what is politically incorrect. Not surprisingly, anything which does not begin and end with "I eat lowcarb and it's the answer to the universe" is on the un-PC list, and lucky for me, so far, LC really HAS been at least part of the answer to my health universe, so I can't diss that shining ideal. But it hasn't yet been the whole answer, which is perhaps no fault to LC, it just means there's clearly a larger question, and it probably starts with 'nutrition' and possibly exercise involvement, as well as micronutrient (not just the macro of carbs/cals/protein) intake, as well as a drama queen getting off her supersized butt and doing it consistently.

Oh wait, you mean my own effort is supposed to be part of the process here?! Oh yeah! I forgot! (And to think, I was all set to blame Atkins, because we all know that his falling on ice is the reason I eat too much peanut butter and why we should keep buying Nabisco chips. Anybody who doesn't see the connection here hasn't been reading enough modern AP newsline 'public relations versions of ridiculously bad alleged-science studies funded by food producers' marketing designed-as-news.)

Aside from "the rest" of the answer to my health, whatever it(s) may be, there is another issue that lowcarb hasn't yet been able to solve: the issue of a single supersized (5'6" ~370#) 43 year old mom and her obese (~5'2" 180#) 12 year old daughter, hereinafter referred to simply as: The Low-Carb Drama Queens.


Drama Queen cue: "Good Morning!", also known as, "Mo-ommmmm, I'm hungry, make me food! What is there to eat that isn't meat or eggs or dairy or gluten-free almond/flax/coconut and can be made quickly 'cause I'm starving and you have to work?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. Your friends live on McDonalds and can wear skinny jeans. If you don't learn to live on chicken and flax you will cease fitting into your size 16 stretch denim leggings which already look like they are about to bust 4 seams simultaneously. And Mom will just continue being the size of a refrigerator but slightly better looking.

Should you successfully live on meat and glutenless other-things three times a day for the next seven days plus no bad snacks and no sneaking food in the night, your total reward for this impressive 168 solid hours of dedication will be: er, probably nothing. You might, maybe, have lost a pound, although increased exercise or muscle retention may in turn be making that seem worse instead of better. But you are supposed to have faith that if you combine those 168 solid hours of effort into another round and another round and another round that eventually you will see actual results. No, this does not equate to mom's belief in the tooth fairy.

Drama Queen negotiation: well can't we have enough cheese to stop a German tank in its tracks, like some Dairy Society version of Non-Lethal Weapons, with which we could completely obliterate the taste (and point) of having eggs or meat with the meal? Preferably also with something else high-fat for taste such as sour cream for example, or some lowcarb (but not when it's in quantity) ketchup?

Answer: well I suppose. There, I made you happy! Now, we just ingested a breakfast with as many calories as a federal banking bailout costs dollars, and hence the former experience will be just about as good for us as the latter. It is potentially true that if our overall carbs from all that cheese and sour cream managed to stay relatively low, we might not gain weight, but, given that (a) we can gain fat by even thinking of non-diet sodas (a medical process hereinafter known as "quantum soda metabolation") and (b) the carbs aren't real low in that case, well it's probably going to make things worse, unless (c) miraculously we don't gain fat from it, which merely means that (d) we managed to survive another meal and hours of life and get one meal closer to burnout and flying off the wagon in frustration, all without doing a damn thing about the weight problem.


Drama Queen cue: It's lunchtime, also known as "Mo-ommmm, make me food, I'm hungry! What can we have that isn't what breakfast was and isn't meat or veggies or funky flax/almond/coconut variants?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. It's not the fault of girls you see all over the place that they were probably born with genetics that make them thin while you were born to a 300# insulin resistant mother with high blood pressure and no prenatal care until 7 months and a lousy diet before, during and after pregnancy. No I'm not telling you that you were cursed at birth, your grandparents already tell you that, I always tell you that your destiny is in your own hands and we can get a handle on this if we work on it. Would you like some asparagus with that? No, of course I am not trying to make you vomit. We're going to have hamburger patties again. Yes, for the 1,928,834th time. Would you like some ranch dressing to dip that in?


Drama Queen cue: it's dinnertime, also known as "Mo-ommm, make me food, I'm hungry! What can we have that isn't lunch or breakfast and isn't meat or veggies or funky flax/almond/coconut variants?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. Your mother needs to be on a lowcarb eating plan and she actually LIKES meat. Whether this is because she is twice your size and an O positive blood type, vs. your A negative blood type, is unknown, and I heard that's all a 'fad' anyway. To salvage your having to eat meat... AGAIN... I am going to make the meat in a way that you can best stand. I will coat small chunks of chicken in parmesan and bake it and we'll dip it in ranch, or I will drown it in alfredo sauce and we'll bake it. Of course, now we just ate enough calories to ensure this dinner will not lose a single ounce of weight off our bodies, although it may, IF sufficiently lowcarb, prevent yet another ounce from being added.


Drama Queen cue: it's after dinner but before bedtime, also known as "Mo-ommm, make me food, I'm hungry! What can we have that isn't lunch or breakfast and isn't meat or veggies or funky flax/almond/coconut variants?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. Your growth hormone and many other things have been affected by your being self-sleep deprived and eating carbs before sleep most of your life, so we are solving this by ensuring any snacks are lowcarb. Here, have a string cheese. No, you may not have 11 string cheeses, have ONE.


Next Morning: Drama Queen darling, what happened to Drama Queen mom's cream cheese? Oh, you ate the entire bar with a spoon? And the peanut butter too? And all three of the lowcarb ice cream bar 'treats'? And drink the last six diet sodas? And the entire bag of (8-servings) peas, the legume (not-quite-a-veggie) you like nuked with butter? All while I slept? Despite my attempt to ply you with protein and fat so you wouldn't be hungry? I see. Oh, and you're hungry again because it's morning? Let's re-start that cycle!

End of the week: the scale says, "You ate 2.7 billion calories this week. Your carbs were fairly low, though. You have not really lost any weight. You did rebuild some muscle thanks to the extra protein-aminos. Hence, you have gained a pound."


Drama Queen mom considers her options.

1. Put the child in prison. Build a door at end of hallway that can be locked. Alternatively, explore "the child with the Iron Mask" scenario. This might, after all, lead to her become a rich, if resentful, book heroine someday. Unchecked: not yet tried.

2. Get rid of all interesting food ingredients that allow my average meals to be slightly more interesting, or that allow small treats, or occasional quick foods. This includes cream cheese, peanut butter, any lowcarb treat, diet soda. This leaves: meat. small amounts of cheese. Sometimes a veggie. Check: done. Result: now MY eating plan sucks totally compared to how cool it was before, my variety is lower, my treats are nonexistent, and I can't make anything that doesn't require 'cooking meat or eggs'.

3. Become Mom From Hell. Make food, make complaining about food before, during or after akin to a federal crime by so freaking out at any complaint that child is afraid to mention it. Child will eat it or mom will threaten to rip out her tonsils and stuff it in. Check: mostly done, with variants. I skipped the tonsils part. Problem: this only works in limited duration. Like any other kind of misery, you can get used to it, and then it loses its effectiveness.

4. ____________ please insert your better ideas here.

PJ, aka Drama Queen Mom.