Stay out of my shopping cart.

Apparently, there are people who make a point of eying up what’s in my shopping cart when I go grocery shopping, and if the contents don’t pass muster, I am deemed an unworthy human being.

To that I say, What??! I admit that I probably live in a little fantasy world of my own most of the time, and really have very little interest in what’s going on outside of my head, but who has time for this? Who has the energy to pour silent vitriol on the heads of strangers based on their possible future food consumption?

A few weeks ago, I bought like, a ton of cereal. You know why? Because it was on sale! I was stocking up! Doesn’t make me a cereal binger.

A couple of months ago, I bought a GIANT bag of sugar, lots of other baking supplies, and about 30 eggs. I was doing a lot of baking back then, but no one would know that without asking me.

I often go to several different stores to get the best deals on food. At store X, I buy mostly frozen veggies because they sell ‘em cheap there. At store Y, I buy mostly fresh produce and dairy because, again, cheap. At store Z, I buy everything else. And at the store up the road from me — about a 30 second walk away — I buy chocolate at 9.30 at night because I neeeeeed it.

Just try to judge me by what I buy. I’m either a health food nut or a fatty who eats junk all the time. Either picture is wrong, so maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t waste your time on judging the contents of my shopping cart in the first place.

The way my children eat.

After reading this post on Junkfood Science, I feel like I need to make a few comments.

First of all, since when is cheese an “evil” food? I don’t buy my kids the processed string cheese rubbish because I find it revoltingly rubbery and far too expensive, but the normal cheddar, Red Leicester and Gloucester? Why is this food being vilified? I tend to cut cheese into shapes for my daughter’s lunchbox, but at home I happily give my kids cheese as an every day snack. Shockingly (wait for it), my children are not obese as a result.

But more importantly, I think the pendulum of focus on healthy school lunches has swung into extreme paranoia territory. Do I want school meals to be healthy and balanced (compared to 10 years ago when chips were served daily)? Of course. I also want the meals to be appealing to small children, filling, and not too expensive. Children need a certain amount of calories, nutrients and fats in their diets to grow, play and learn. I kind of thought this was a given.

I digress. The real problem I have with this school lunch hysteria is the idea that we can ‘fix’ a child’s eating habits with one meal a day — that we can control their bodies by restricting their food choices.

My kids eat pretty well. I wish my son would eat his vegetables, but he likes fruit so I try not to worry. I’ve spoken to a few nutritionists over the years, and all of them have reminded me that a healthy diet for a child needs to be measured in weeks, not days. I’ve learned to accept that if my kids don’t want to sniff at meat or eggs today, tomorrow or the next day they will probably be wolfing the stuff down. As far as I’m concerned, this is a normal pattern of eating for children.

It’s our responsibility to provide varied, interesting and wholesome food for our children (including cheese, thank you very much!). It’s their responsibility to eat it.

I am newsworthy.

This bit of fluff is brought to you by the Newspaper Clipping Generator. Enjoy!

Got the job!

Thanks for all the well wishes. I managed to zip myself into my suit trousers and aced the interview! They called me that same day to let me know I got the job.

I’m very pleased.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Insulting, but for whom?

A few months ago, I traveled to the States with my mom to visit family. We stayed with my brother, his wife, and her sister (weird living arrangements, since they’re newlyweds, but whatever). Cue family drama, blah dee blah. Long story short, the sister and my mom had a few disagreements and there is residual bad feelings on my mom’s side. My mom and I were chatting on the phone yesterday, and she started in on this woman’s weight.

Mom: She is really big. Huge!

Me: You do realise that she wears the same size as me, don’t you?

Mom: Oh, yeah, but… you look much smaller! You’re taller and carry yourself better! She’s just BIG!!11!!

Me: *sigh* Remind me again, why is this important?

Mom: It isn’t. I’m just being mean.

Me: Right….

I don’t want to cast my mom in a bad light or anything; she has a lot of weight-related angst herself, has never been happy with her weight, and has a fair bit of disordered eating issues. She wanted to lash out at this woman, and chose to mock her for her weight. Even though I wear the same size clothing as her! I borrowed her skirt while we were over there, fer pete’s sake.

Talk about double-think or what.

Gaining weight.

I have an interview on Wednesday. Oh yes. I am excited, because I should just about be able to squeeze it into my daily life, and child care shouldn’t be too costly. We’ll see.

However, upon digging out my “interview suit”, I’ve come to the obvious conclusion that my cake blog has affected my weight just a bit. Most of my clothing fits me fine, except for a pair of jeans or so, but suit trousers aren’t nearly as forgiving. Blah.

I’m frustrated because they are the best interview clothes I have, and really can’t afford to buy anything else. Hence the job. I’m annoyed because this suit used to fit me like a dream, a few months ago. I can still wear it, but not comfortably. Double blah.

The thing that has taken me by surprise? I don’t really mind. I mean, yes, I want to look nice for the interview, but I don’t feel like a failure as a human being because I gained a few pounds. After 30 days of cakes, I’m certainly not surprised.

I want to change the clothes, not my body. So thank you, fatosphere. I wouldn’t have felt this way a year ago. It is a shocking, relieving feeling, being happy in my skin. Shame about the clothes, though.

Happy food-related memories

After finishing my cake project, I realised that one of the main reasons why I love baking so much is because I learned from my mother. I have many memories of standing next to her while she measured ingredients, or watching her break yet another electric mixer while making Divinity. Because of my mom, I was able to bake my own cake at my 8th birthday party. Baking is part of the fabric of my life, and I love it. It’s not always about the end result; mostly it’s about sharing small moments with my mom (and now with my own children) or tweaking the recipe to make it “just right.” Baking all those cakes was a pleasurably nostalgic experience, and I probably wouldn’t have made the connection between my past and present without baking them all.

This sense of nostalgia and connection to my past is why I miss a lot of American food. When I was actually in America a few months ago, and could eat as much Jiffy peanut butter as I wanted (or whatever else I have craved over the years), I really had no desire to eat it. The food was about reliving memories rather than actually physically hungering after it.

The HAES movement talks about feeding your body what it wants, and trusting your instincts. I myself go through cheese cycles, where I don’t eat it at all for weeks at a time, and then BAM for three days straight I can’t get enough of the stuff. I think that emotional eating, to connect with your past or with the people around you, is also a legitimate way of feeding your body. I spent a month sampling the cakes that I made (and giving them away and sometimes even throwing them out), and I’m happy I did it. True, I didn’t need those cakes, and I didn’t necessarily even want them sometimes, so I only ate what I felt like eating. It was worth it!

A friend of mine told me that she really, really dislikes eating beets. But because she has fond memories of her beet-eating grandma, she will eat them from time to time. It’s one way of remembering her.

Do you have any happy food memories? What do you eat for nostalgia’s sake, even if you don’t actually adore it?

Fit versus Fun

Due to ever increasing petrol prices, I’ve been trying to use the car less each day. This proves to be a challenge when I have to transport my kids to school, especially when their schools are in opposite directions to each other!

The convoluted solution I have reached goes like this: The two smaller children sit in the double buggy, the oldest child (5yo) rides her bike, and I push the buggy along while wearing roller skates. My eldest and I have races on the way to school, and it’s a whole lot of fun. I get to school dripping with sweat and all smiles; we have literally laughed and giggled all the way to school and I love it. After I hand her safely over to her teacher (and on time!), my middle child (3.5yo) gets out of the buggy and rides the bike on our way to his nursery school. This is more of a challenge, because he’s younger and more likely to get tired and distracted. My patience runs a bit thin, because I’m quite tired at that point, and we finally get him to school about an hour after he should have been there.

I manage to get him to school (mostly) without any major incident, and then load the bike up into the extra buggy seat and roller skate on home. All together, the morning school run takes about an hour, up to 90 minutes, and I will have skated about 4 miles.

Of course, I get a lot of comments. You don’t often see people skating around here, let alone skating while pushing a buggy. Most people assume I’m doing it to “get fit,” but I’m really not. We get to school faster in the morning if I’m skating alongside my daughter while she rides her bike. (We’re still working on that with my son…) I’m trying to use less petrol. Getting fit (euphemism for losing weight) is not very high on the agenda.

The thing is, I wanted to roller skate because it looked fun. It is fun! I really enjoy it; it’s hard work, but I am actually smiling as I skate along. I feel like a kid again, like I’m playing. Getting fit sounds like work without any reward. This is reward with a little bit of work thrown in. Big difference.

A change in diet, not a “diet.”

My husband is diabetic. He’s type 1, meaning he is insulin dependent. Long story short, about two and a half years ago, he caught a simple cold or flu virus and his body created the antibodies to kill it. Unfortunately, those antibodies also killed off the islets in his pancreas, the cells that create insulin. It was a fluke, and he couldn’t have done anything to change it.

He went to the clinic today, and his blood test came back with mixed results. On the one hand, his sugars are down within the normal range, which is EXCELLENT news. Worth throwing a party for and everything! Unfortunately, his cholesterol is a bit high (not dangerous, but just high) and they aren’t happy about his weight gain. His weight has been going up and up since he was diagnosed, and they want him to lose a bit.

He is 5′9″ and weighs just over 15 stone. I can tell he’s been putting some weight on, and my cake blog isn’t helping matters I’m sure (sorry, hon!), but he doesn’t look alarmingly obese!!111!! to me.

The thing is, before the diabeeetus, he was a very healthy, intuitive eater. He ate what he wanted and didn’t overeat much at all. He was a great example of eating what your body needs. His problem now is twofold, I think. Diabetics really need to keep a close eye on their sugar intake, and I think that psychologically, he’s fighting that. “Mustn’t eat sugar. Must eeeeaaaat suuuuuugarr!” His body, on the other hand, quite literally demands sugar when it gets too low. His hands shake, his lips go numb, and if it dips too much, he stumbles around in a sort of drunken state. It’s bad, and scary to experience for both him and me. Whenever he mentions that he’s feeling a bit “hypo” I shovel sugar down his gullet like there’s no tomorrow. So that doesn’t help, either.

He doesn’t need to go on a diet. His food choices are limited enough, and I’m not interested in mothering him and weighing food portions or whatever. He just needs to make better choices. I’m kind of at a loss as to how to go about it.

I love him no matter what he weighs, but I know that his current habit of sitting down at night and eating lots of sugary junk food isn’t helping his long-term health. Any thoughts?

A step forward for FA? Fat (or Not Sticklike) mermaids

My five year old was cutting up some pictures from a magazine, and found little mermaid pictures from an advertised book series entitled Mermaid SOS.

These are pictures of some of the mermaids she cut out:

This was the first picture I really noticed, and the first thing that struck me was that she had a very thick waist, and a much more fish-like, muscular tail. Compared to Disney’s Ariel, this girl-mermaid looks much more normal sized to me. Ariel’s appearance focuses on her drastically tiny waist and dainty mermaid tail. Other mermaids in this book series look similarly normal:

I like the variation in sizes in this picture. The mermaid on the left is quite a bit smaller than the one in the middle, and the one on the right is sort of in-between the first two.

Again, a pretty nice variety in sizes and shapes, with the mermaid on the left leaning toward apple-shaped and the middle mermaid looks very pear-ish to me.

Granted, none of these pictures show an actual fat mermaid, but they look like average girls to me, and not the impossibly thin Barbie mermaid dolls that are on the market. As far as I’m aware, Mermaid SOS is only a book series and there are no dolls. I haven’t read the books so I don’t know if they are worth my money, but based on these images alone, I think they are at least worth a look. If they had dolls to go with the books, I would be very tempted to buy them. (Although, if I’m totally honest, I would prefer it if their tops covered their waists, but I understand this is part of the mermaid “look”.)

So, maybe not a step forward for Fat Acceptance as such, but at least a step towards normalcy and sanity in marketing towards little girls.