If there is one place in life where I get irritated about fairness more than any other, it’s in my inability to lose weight while other people don’t seem to have that issue at all. I can’t eat like Bradley, if I do, I gain. A candy bar is a commitment that my future self will have to lose two pounds, basically. My body is my own, I have to be careful. He loses weight faster than I do, too. Bodies aren’t fair, they’re unique and special and have different requirements.
One of the biggest reasons why I got heavy so quickly was because my husband can eat anything. He has a fabulous metabolism. (It must be all his fault- so easy to blame others, right??) I, on the other hand, take calories and am one of the best, most efficient fat-making and storing machines that walks the earth. Like, seriously. I have PCOS, which is notorious for helping the ladies pack the pounds on and it even does the favor of helping us hang onto the pounds like no one’s business as well. When we were first married I would create our plates so they were totally even. If Bradley had seconds on something, so would I because I assumed that we were eating appropriate portion sizes since he was capable of maintaining a reasonable weight while also eating as much as we were. The result was a gain of over 100 pounds for me, but Bradley only gained about 40. Neither of us were eating appropriate portion sizes or making good food choices, but my body showed a greater ability to transform those calories into body mass instead of using it as an available energy source (it must be said, too, that he has always been more active and maintained a greater muscle mass, so there’s that, too.)
One of the hardest things I’ve had to shift in my head as I have been working through my body project is this very issue. Bradley can eat a lot more than I can eat. He loses weight better with a different diet that I do – he prefers to eat cheese, nuts, yogurt and fruit all day while I lose well by eating fruits, veggies and clean protein but skipping cheeses and nuts altogether. When it came down to it, I just had to realize that our body chemistry is not the same, thus we don’t lose or gain weight at the same rate given the same input.
Not so long ago I was talking with a friend of mine who is in the process of losing a lot of weight. Her husband just went through a pretty big weight-loss cycle and is now at a maintenance point. She told me how he was sitting on the couch all night eating snacks that looked yummy, so eventually, for fairness sake, she headed to the store and found some things for her to eat too. Unfortunately she’s a lot like me. Her husband can eat a lot of stuff that she can’t! She immediately plateaued her weight and stop losing for a little over a month but her husband continue to stay the same and didn’t see any problems at all. It was incredibly frustrating for her to realize that she can’t eat the same as her husband can.
As she was sharing her story with me and I was sharing my similar story with her, we both just cried, whined came to the conclusion that we’re going to have to put our big girl panties on and realize that there are differences between us and our spouses. In this case, we both need to realize that our diet needs to be significantly different than our husbands’. She and I cannot eat big portions and we really cannot eat candy, junk or sweets without paying for it BIG TIME in workout minutes or weight gain!
The text that accompanied this photo to my husband during lunch today: Who has two thumbs, silly math ideas and is a big dork? This girl!
Except have you ever tried to take a thumb selfie? Yeah. Kinda need the thumbs to hold the phone. It was complicated to say the least.
My silly math idea was that we ‘married’ our favorite addition strategy. If you’re interested, go to the jump and you can ooh and ahh at the verbiage that will accompany the work on the board. 😉