More low-fat ranting

Quote from Dr. Jennifer Shults

We are at the end, I hope, of an unprecedented experiment in nutritional human history – voluntarily eating very little fat. During this time obesity rates have skyrocketed, as have levels of Alzheimer’s Disease, infertility and mood disorders. It can be a bit scary to buck the low-fat trend, but there is no contesting the fact that many neurotransmitters and hormones that affect mood are made from fat, and that our brain itself consists largely of fats. How fat got so demonized is a complicated story, and part of the confusion has to do with the fact that not all fats are the same. Here is my simple breakdown to help you think about fat. Fat with sugar (ice cream, donuts) is a bad combination, and should be MUCH lower in most of our diets. If fat is not combined with sugar then our body will give us a signal when we have had enough.

Quote source 

That's why recipes like this one or this one make me want to bang my head against the wall. Because I know that there are people who look at recipes like this and and think, "Well, it has LOW FAT ingredients, so it's healthy, right?"

NO! No! NO!

(I decided to rant here rather than at my 51 friends who post these crap recipes on facebook all the freakin' time.)

I'm not dying!

After the horrible month that was June I was totally ready to turn things around in July - to refocus and start losing again. I did okay for a week and then I got slammed with a wicked migraine, which was the beginning of three weeks of "I think I'm dying" as I suffered from:

• fatigue (This is all just so too much.)
• exhaustion (Can I just sleep for like 18 hours?)
• headaches
• irritability
• anxiety
• salt cravings (One day I ate an entire bag of potato chips. Another day it was a jar of olives.)
• being even more ridiculously cold than usual

And then yesterday....PAIN. My entire pelvic area and my lower back hurt SO VERY MUCH. And I am not wimpy about pain.

I seriously was thinking about making a trip to an urgent care center or the emergency room. I felt so horrible I thought something was dreadfully wrong, like maybe I had mono or cancer or a raging infection or something.

Now, for some women, this list of symptoms might seem like an obvious trail of clues. But I have PCOS so my hormones are totally whacked so it wasn't until I actually started my period early yesterday afternoon that I realized, "Oh! Is that all this is?" 

I do not take medication for my PCOS. I deal with it by taking herbal supplements and healthy eating and exercise. (Or I ignore it and get really fat and sick.) Once I've started living healthy and losing weight, it takes awhile for my system to regulate, which is apparently what happened this time. (I've been losing/maintaining for seven months with nary a visit from Aunt Flo.) Hopefully now I'll be back on a regular cycle and won't have any future episodes like this one. 

I also hope that August will be the month when I finally get back to a place of losing weight again. I've been in the upper 170s for TWO MONTHS now. Argh.



***PCOS is an endocrine disorder. Essentially, my body overproduces insulin and the excess insulin throws off every single other hormone in my body - estrogen, progesterone, and androgens (reproductive health), serotonin and dopamine (mood), melatonin (sleep), cortisol (stess and immunity), and many many others. It's a horrible syndrome. 

PCOS is an acronym for Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, which is a stupid name because polycystic ovaries are just one possible symptom. You don't even need to have polycystic ovaries to have PCOS. There is actually an ongoing movement to change the name.