Rabbiting on

Tuesday:

My son is home sick today and I'm not getting any work done so I thought I'd just come here and rabbit on a bit.

I'm doing better with the food. Exercise is still a bit of struggle. Am I still getting over my illness of last week, or are my vague symptoms of achy legs and stiff neck and tiredness just the usual ailments of someone carrying an extra 20 kgs and not moving their body enough? I never know. My compromise is to do gentle exercise like walking.

Yesterday I was trying to write and the words were coming slowly and painfully so I ended up going out for a walk instead. And that got the creative juices really flowing - the scene I was struggling with suddenly became clear. Walking is good thinking time.

I watched a documentary about obesity last night, I think it's one I've seen before, with a rather judgemental skinny female doctor learning that obesity is not just a matter of character. She was stunned to be shown hormone levels from an obese person compared with her own, and how different they were. So fat people aren't just lazy slobs? The obese person's hormones never signalled fullness properly, so they were at least a bit hungry all the time. And they did an experiment on her (disguising what they were actually testing for) where they made her fast for 24 hours, then offering her a wide variety of foods and when really hungry she went for the fatty sweet carb-laden foods that she would normally avoid. When her hormones told her that's what she needed, she gave in at once and obeyed. And when they altered an obese person's hormone levels by giving them a gastric bypass, the person made food choices like a not-obese person. [They didn't say this in the doco, but I think it's a vicious cycle with high levels of body fat affecting hormones, which affect diet, which increase body fat etc.] They also looked at identical twins and how life stresses had put one twin on the path to obesity and not the other. Anyway, the doctor was really amazed at how things other than just lack of willpower affect obesity, and that it is actually more difficult for some people to be a healthy weight. One of the researchers on the show hoped that work with the vital hormones ghrelin and leptin would help obese people in the future without having to section off most of their stomachs.

So that was interesting.

I've had similar dreams two nights in a row. First my son was somehow out of the car (he has just turned 7, still my little boy) and we had trouble finding somewhere to stop and park then had to walk up this long hill and I was hurrying and looking and walking and finally found him. My legs were really sore yesterday morning and I wonder if I was actually trying to walk uphill in my sleep? Then last night I got on a bus with him and realised I didn't have my money so told him to stay in his seat and told the bus driver to wait just a second and got off the bus and it drove away. And I was walking and walking miles following it, trying to catch up. I wonder what these dreams mean, what my subconscious is really worried about.

I talked a while ago about why I wasn't going to go to my cousin's engagement party. Yesterday I told my mum (by email) about how I felt like a slug amongst butterflies around them. She hasn't responded yet. She is the only other overweight one in the family, so she may have been dealing with the same problems her whole life. I wasn't going to talk to her about it but she was wondering why I wasn't going so I decided to. I feel a bit guilty because it is her family and I hardly ever see them, I see my husband's family much more often and feel more comfortable with them.