the big texan.

Last stop in Amarillo - the Big Texan

Free gigantic steak if you can eat it all, and a baked potato, and a shrimp coctail and salad and roll. 

$72 bucks if you can't finish it

oh and you have to sit at a big table in front of everyone and be on webcam.

we didn't try - though I teased Kyle incessantly to...

That's all folks - we made this trip to Amarillo instead of doing the State fair like we did last year.

not to knock the State fair because it was its own special breed of awesomeness, but we did this little road trip for only a little more dough and had a blast!!

(and I can't help but wonder if my mom of oz tag has been painted over yet...)

My tips for road tripping with a large family:

1. I know lots of people like the lots of "stuff" method but I start to lose my mind with lots of stuff and electronics and snacks. I like a book on CD that will entertain most. Three snacks that will occupy most and  juice boxes - the box from those becomes the trashcan.

2. Van is somewhat reorganized at every stop.

3. You HAVE to have one of these little potty's  Your kids might need it way past its age appropriateness.

4. Sometimes mom has to sit in the back with the kids. The lack of adult conversation will be offset with the lack of fighting.

5. The alphabet game never gets old and my husband is uber competitive. And talking can be better than the radio and sometimes we do the NO TALKING, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW or we are leaving you behind at the next stop. Don't double dog dare us to.

6. Stopping to get bread and a little jar of mayo and lunch meat (get a lone knife at the salad bar) is way cheaper for a family of seven though we didn't do that this trip. And we reserve doing some more expensive things on trips like vending machines that I usually say NO WAY to, can be there own little adventure.

7. an actual paper map with a marker to check off distance traveled slows the "are we there yets?"

8. Find out a little bit of the history of where you are going because your kids will be a little disappointed that when were are actually  "there" Amarillo just looks like Plano. America's kind of turned into one vast wasteland of all the same billboards and restaurants off the interstate.

9. A hotel with an indoor pool and a hot breakfast bar is worth it. Need a good deal on travel go here: Abundant Travel.

10. Oh yeah - your jacket is your pillow and your blanket. 

the end.

Weight loss surgery on children, when the world totally lost its ever loving mind.

I didn't even intend to write about HAES today but then I read that England was going to start covering gastric weight loss surgery for children as young as ELEVEN.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

holy mother of all that is unholy and evil and stupid.

ELEVEN.

Because you should be interfering with your body's gastric system before you are even solidly into puberty and are most certainly not done growing.  And to tick me off more they included headless fatty pictures of children and fat child eating junk food pictures to the article.

I hate headless fatty pictures.  If you want pictures of fat people come take a picture of me and my husband flying kites with our kids or hiking or in our Sunday best.

You want a fat person eating fast food, pan out on that zoom lens you got going on and see that there are probably thin people next to them eating THE EXACT SAME STUFF. Funny thing is last time I took my kids to the playland at McDonalds there were plenty of thin people there.

Anyway I digress...


There was also the news story of a sweet woman who died after lap band surgery.

Rojeski, a Ladera Ranch resident who loved dogs and worked as a buyer for an aerospace firm, had told friends and family that she was looking forward to the Lap-Band surgery. One friend described Rojeski as being thrilled ahead of what she hoped would be a life-changing procedure.

"I had just talked to Paula the night before. She was really excited, really happy. She told me, 'I'm going to be skinny!'" 

so. so. sad.

There is also news that a new group has formed to fight for obesity rights, specifically for obesity to be considered a disease on its own accord.

One might on first thought think this is a fat acceptance group fighting for equal rights, rights for people to work, be promoted etc. despite their size.

not so.

CHOICE – Choosing Health Over Obesity and Inspiring Change Through Empowerment.


is, drum roll please...


"Choice" is actually Allergan and the public face to their BIG, BIG business lobbying of government to get obesity considered a disease so they can FORCE insurance agencies and medicare/medicaid to cover obesity surgeries.


SURGERIES That are KILLING PEOPLE!!
following from here:


In the more than forty years that bariatric surgeries have been performed, there have been no randomized, controlled clinical trials that have shown any long-term improvements to actual health or that lives are saved or extended by these surgeries

The end result of bariatric surgery is surgically induced malnutrition:

Gastric bypass essentially results in surgically enforced, very low-calorie, low-carbohydrate dietary intake, thus requiring attention to adequate (>0.5 g/kg) daily protein intake. Micronutrients, including calcium, vitamin B12, folate, multivitamins, thiamine, and iron (for menstruating female subjects), must be supplemented after gastric bypass. A bariatric dietitian who is familiar with the progressive addition of food items with more complex compositions and consistencies can help with meal planning and nutritional “troubleshooting” as recovery proceeds. Finally, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications should be avoided, to reduce the risk of intestinal ulceration and bleeding.

Dr. Smith then discusses the patients in her practice who have had bariatric surgery. A few have done okay, but most haven’t even though they had their surgeries done by the same surgeon and at the same medical center.

One lady passes kidney stones every couple of weeks. Another regurgitates anything solid that she tries to eat and yet has only lost 20 pounds in six months. She says she makes up the calories in liquid. Another can not eat more than one slice of toast at a time without getting sick. Some have chronic diarrhea. Many have nutritional deficiencies. A couple have gained their weight back after 10 or 20 years. And yet, not one of them says they regret having the surgery, such is the praise they get from others for losing weight. If asked, every single one of them would call themselves healthier, but from my perspective their health is worse. They all require more monitoring and more interventions than they did before having the surgery.

It's the height of arrogance, however, to push this medically induced malnourished state on a still developing and growing child. We don't know what damage we may do in the long-run to their bodies or their minds with these procedures.

Her observations partly explain why we hear so little about the severity and prevalence of tragic outcomes among these patients, why patients are not speaking out and bringing lawsuits in droves, and why so few patients really understand beforehand the risks and what their lives will be like after surgery. These are critically important realizations for healthcare professionals, families and anyone considering these surgeries. So, I am going to expound upon them in hopes that it will bring better understanding and enable us to better help our patients, friends and loved ones.

One bariatric patient shared with other patients her experiences:

...If you tell the average person that doesn't really know what weight loss surgery is, they are totally stunned. They just know that your stomach is smaller and that you lose weight. They don't know that the body is getting butchered up. And for the people who do know what the surgery entails, they are so caught up in the disgrace of being obese that they think it's okay to butcher the body to be almighty thin.

When I became very sick, almost 6 years ago, trying to find a doctor to help me, I had friends and relatives tell me “but you would be dead if you hadn't gotten the surgery!” --- and here I was, dying when they were telling me this, because of the surgery! This is how ingrained it is in society, how dangerous it is to be obese.

By having bariatric surgery a woman 


increases her risk of dying 45-fold.


My lasting opinion of all of this is: I may write about this just to change women's perspectives but really altering society's ideals of beauty is a live saving endeavor.


ALL people, especially fat people and more especially fat children NEED to know that they belong in this world. 
Food is not evil. It nourishes you. 
Your body is not wrong it houses you.
Moving feels good and is good for you, you should find a place where you can do it without ridicule.
Don't let anyone cut on your body just to make it look different. 
If you survive the surgery, you may live with unintended consequences for the 
REST. OF. YOUR. LIFE. 

Palo Duro Canyon

Amarillo By Mornin'
Up from San Antone
Everything that I got
Is just what I've got on.
When that sun is high in that Texas sky,
I'll be buckin' at the county fair.
Amarillo By Mornin'
Amarillo I'll be there.

 

If you go to Amarillo when you get done with your graffiti at Cadillac Ranch, the next place to see is 

Palo Duro Canyon

• Known as “Texas’ Grand Canyon.”

• Man has inhabited Palo Duro Canyon for approximately 12,000 years.

• Palo Duro Canyon is located on the southern high plains, an area called El Llano Estacado or "staked plains." 

• The rim of the canyon is considered part of the short grass prairie while the elevated moisture of the canyon floor supports a 

greater diversity of plants including some medium and tall grass species along with shrubs and trees. 

• Palo Duro Canyon contains many species of wildlife including the rare Texas Horned Lizard, and Palo Duro Mouse.

• Other species include wild turkey, white tail and mule deer, Barbary sheep, coyotes, cottontail rabbits, roadrunners, and 

western diamondback rattlesnakes. 

• The canyon is approximately 120 miles long, 20 miles wide, and 800 feet deep. 

• The slopes of the canyon reveal the colorful natural history of the area.

• Dating back 250 million years, the oldest layers of rock, Cloud Chief Gypsum, can only be seen in a few areas in the canyon

You have my permission to forgive yourself.

When I was 12 you said "wow you'd make two of her"
When I was 30 I overheard you say "its too bad she let herself go."
I've worked hard to forgive 'you'. But I've had to work harder to forgive myself.
I'm not blaming myself anymore. It stops now.

I have been writing about size acceptance and Health at Every size but I think I need to slow down and explain some more of "my truth"
I call it my truth because that is what it is. I will point to some studies and cite some resources but the theme is that this is my truth. I've lived in this body for almost 34 years and for many of those years its a been a body easily judged.
When I blog about health at every size - I don't blog to necessarily convince anyone of anything - though that would be nice. I blog for the me 15 years ago who needed this. I can't go back in time and talk to that me but maybe someone else can read this and benefit.

Fat is not wrong.
Fat is not a sin or weakness.
Fat is not a necessarily a sign that you are unhealthy.
Fat will not kill you.
Fat will not cost society bazillions in healthcare costs.
Its NOT a simple equation of Calories in/Calories out
Almost any statement about fat following 'well everybody knows..." is most of the time opinion and rarely an actual fact
Healthy choices are paramount but what you look like is determined by many factors: genetics, hormones, environment, thyroid issues, PCOS, etc...
Diets don't work. The measure of a successful diet is five years of maintained weight loss. The success rate for that is less than 5% - a statistical failure. What diets do succeed at is money making - a 60 BILLION dollar soul crushing industry.

from here:

If we wanted long term weight loss using this theory (calories in/calories out) then we’d have to eventually turn to starvation

If we wanted to use calories in/calories out effectively, knowing what we now know about entropy and how decrease in caloric intake causes decreased basal metabolic rate, we would just have to keep decreasing our calories and increasing our exercise until eventually we would be following disordered eating patterns.  It would be the only way to stay under our ever plummeting BMR and eat less than we burn. Perhaps this is why 95% of intentional weight loss efforts fail.  The body releases weight at first but then the damn science catches up to us and no matter how hard the people who’ve attended a physics amateur hour try to yell to the contrary, they will never be able to out-science the actual laws of thermodynamics and the complicated human body...

I'll give you a moment to take that all in.
You may disagree.  That is ok.

I've had plenty of thin roommates - in fact all the non-related females I have lived with were size 0-8 - mostly in the size 2 area. One was a size 00 - I didn't even know that size existed till her.  I wasn't overly impressed with their willpower or exercise habits - we had similar eating and exercise habits. Yet I felt like a failure because my dress size exceeded what GAP would carry.

following info from here:


Starting in 1959 Jules Hirsch was curious about weight loss - he basically starved 8 fat people with a 600 calorie diet until they had lost significant amounts of weight. Thinking their bodies were so drastically altered and now in a thin state they could maintain it. Not so -they regained and he was horrified.. And his testing went on and on to the point that participants in his studies experienced starvation induced neurosis.While in this state of reduced caloric intake participants metabolism dropped up to 24%.  The requirement to maintain weight loss long term was to be metabolically in a constant state of starvation.


Then another researcher Ethan Sims wondered if naturally thin people deliberately got fat what would happen. He had prisoners volunteer for the experiment - trying to gain as much weight as possible. It took tremendous effort. Four to six months of consuming up to 10,000 calories a day (yes you read that right). During this phase their metabolism increased up to 50%. And when the study ended they effortlessly returned to normal weight and stayed there.

The message is clear. Your body has a set point weight it wants you to be at. Disease may alter that level but doctors should treat disease not size. "Lose weight" is not a prescription.

There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body's metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.


The message of these studies never really got out to the nation's dieters. What industry would benefit from: "its good for your body to be healthy, but really in the end you'll look like your parents."

Some days I get so sick of diet and weight loss surgery ads. I think I should write a HAES post for every single one I hear. But I'd probably not have fingers left.

More interesting studies have been done on twins:

Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young - 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.


The scientists summarized it in their paper: "The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect."


In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.


A few years later, in 1990, Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.


The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.


The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples' weights might be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.


The message is so at odds with the popular conception of weight loss - the mantra that all a person has to do is eat less and exercise more - that Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight.


He published it in the journal Science in 2000 and still cites it:


"Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one's breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe," Friedman wrote. "The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty.


This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight."

What it comes down to is this.
Healthy choices will always be good for you.
Intuitive eating may make you weigh less, it may not.
But its better than hating yourself any day.


Please follow the rest of the series by clicking on a label below - it all started here

Carhenge.

We like road trips, so we took a little one over to Amarillo. There just past the city off the side of the highway are ten cadillacs buried nose down in the field. With graffiti encouraged by the masses.

We headed that way with five kids and six cans of spray paint. 

two warnings: 

don't set your spray paint down for a second. people throw half used cans on the ground and other scavenge them, if you turn your back on yours it will get taken.

if you take a three year old way out in the field to pee, an artsy fartsy woman with a scarf on a hot day might make a rude comment to you.

but breastfeeding seemed to be ignored by most :)

Palo Duro Canyon will be a blog for another day.

post-edit: the flesh you see is PJ's elbow not me..I'm  a poet and I don't know it and my foot's a longfellow.

Very special day.

"The temple is concerned with things of immortality. It is a bridge between this life and the next. All of the ordinances that take place in the house of the Lord are expressions of our belief in the immortality of the human soul."

—Gordon B. Hinckley

 Mother and Son

 Alice and her sweet boss Laura and her husband David (who's wicked awesome funny :)

 Alice and ALL her missionaries - amazing that they all got to come to the Temple!

:)

as always - to learn more go here:
http://mormon.org/
or comment ...