Eating vs. Exercising

I seem to be running into a strange problem. With my newfound interest in cooking, I find myself making all these tasty things – deep-dish pizza, pumpkin butterscotch cookies, cheddar biscuits (like the ones from Red Lobster), among other things. They all sound tasty. They are, in fact, all very tasty.

This becomes problematic when what I am making in the kitchen is both very tasty and not exactly low in calories. I’m not a dedicated exercise person; I do exercises when I can, but in general, I find it extremely boring to do. I also have a problem in that my metabolism tends to run pretty slowly. I have friends who could probably eat a diet of lard-covered lard with a lard chaser and still lose weight, but it feels like I gain weight when I even look at food. So, making good-looking, good-tasting food, even if it is nominally healthy (which I’m not sure can ever, ever describe deep-dish pizza), just doesn’t do enough to help me.

I’ve looked into supplements for weight loss and energy – most recently Hydroxycut, HighT, alli, and TriAdalean (some of these links aren’t great, and for that I apologize). It is hard to evaluate these, especially for me, as I have no health insurance and I can’t really go to a doctor to ask him or her if there is anything else I could be doing medically to help with weight loss. My lack of a thyroid gland (I had in ablated many years ago) means that I have a metabolism that tends towards low, which means it is difficult to lose weight, and easy to gain it. I wasn’t exactly stick-thin even before my thyroid was ablated, so it constantly feels like I am fighting a losing battle, especially when it feels like every pushup, every proto-pullup, is just a bit tougher than the day before because there is just no reliable way to control my weight.

I want to be able to cook, exercise, and control my weight. I want to be able to say, occasionally, that my clothes sizes are going down instead of up. It sounds like a small thing to ask, but sadly, it is almost exactly the opposite. And while my weight may be more physical than it is mental, it definitely has an effect on my mental state – it’s hard to have self-compassion when every time I look at myself in the mirror I feel like breaking the damn thing.

This all sounds depressing, but really it is more sobering, because I know that odds are that I’ll never look even remotely like I did when I was in high school, and I will probably never, barring some sort of freak health kick, exercise regimen, or weight-loss surgery, have a pants size under 40. That just seems to be the unfortunate reality of the situation right now.