My mind is so scattered. So I'm not horny, and when I say not horny I mean I'm not seeking out porn. If I attempt to stimulate myself in the shower, I'm still flacid. It's a weird feeling, but I think I really need to ride this out so I can feel real feelings.
Another thing I'm changing in my life besides embracing my femme side, losing weight. I think if you asked a hundred crossdressers what the one honest thing they wish they could change about themselves, the majority vote probably isn't going to honestly be I wish I had boobs or a vagina, they probably wish they had a better body. Every crossdresser is stimulated by beauty, and unfortunately we are a vain bunch that enjoy looking at the female body more than most.
I've been heavy pretty much my whole life, even growing up. Well ok, maybe since 8-9 (most kids aren't fat, it's conditioned as they grow up). When I hit high school, I lost a bunch of weight. Not skinny mind you, but major weight loss (I think I was skateboarding a lot). I slowly regained the pounds and remained so well into my 20's. I ate crappy food, I drank tons of soda, no wonder why I was gaining. Then when I turned 35, I decided to start with cutting out soda. This helped tremendously, and I went from probably 335lbs to about 290 and plateaued. I would lose a pound or two here or there but nothing major. Then finally I got really sick for a good 2 weeks, so I wasn't eating hardly anything. Bam, I dropped to 270lbs. Then we started going to the gym, and doing 4-6 5k races every summer, and by 37 I was looking pretty dam good:
I got myself down to 245lbs which is a decent weight being 6'5". This is one of my crossdressed photos when I was at my lowest weight:
So fast forward to today, and I'm back up to about 290lbs. It's not a total relapse, but still not where I want to be. For the last 2-3 months I've been eating healthy lunches, trying to limit sweets, eating soups / salads for dinner, really not losing anything. My wife is also on a planned meal diet, and although she's lost 10lbs, it's the kind of diet that's very calorie restrictive and she should be losing more. Granted we cheat now and then, nothing that should throw us off that badly. Also I question what's causing us to want to cheat. If our bodies are getting what they're supposed to, shouldn't we be able to eat normally? What's causing these cravings?
As you probably noticed, a big portion of america has gotten fatter. Clothes are getting bigger, cars are getting bigger, it's really an epidemic. You can blame HFCS, you can blame fast food, you can blame portion sizes, or maybe just america's laziness. A lot of us have office jobs where we sit most of the day, we get home from a mind draining day and the last thing we want to do is workout. We want to just plop down in front of the TV and eat our dinner and go to bed.
Personally, I avoid HFCS, I avoid fast food, I avoid sugar (I use monk fruit). My daily caloric maximum should be between 2400-2600 calories, and besides snacks my meals range from 250-500 calories so I should be well below that number. Although I don't workout like I should, I also don't just sit on the couch everyday. If I'm not doing household chores nearly every night, I'm working on my hobby. So you would think I could maintain at least a reasonable figure no? Am I getting to that age where I really have to start working hard to fight my body's slowing metabolism? Well I'm getting tired of being good and still having very good results so I started googling around.
First things first, leg cramp. Yea, I was getting a really bad cramp, like if I was standing for more than 20 minutes I'd have to lean on my other leg bad cramps. I thought I was getting some disease, my body was breaking down. Then I discovered what is likely causing leg cramps, oh look aspertame. I was already putting this crap in my body through water enhancers (I use mio now which uses splenda), and to boost that inktake I was chewing a LOT of gum to try to curb my snacking. Read an article not only is the aspertame bad, tricking your body by making it think it's getting food when it's not, only makes you want to eat food. Since cutting both of those out, I feel quite a bit better.
On to the next body hack. What else could be causing my body not to lose weight, something that I know I do a lot of and isn't necessarily something our ancestors (who didn't have weight problems) might not be ingesting. Oh right coffee. Turns out this stuff is bad, and there's probably a good reason why a lot of america is fat, just look how many starbucks there are out there. Now keep in mind, I don't have high calorie coffee (400 calories frappacinos). I brew plain coffee, put in my 15-20 calories of fat free creamer in, add my zero calorie monk fruit, no problem right? Well as it turns out coffee is bad, especially an addicting drug of a drink (I'm guilty, I have 3-5 cups every morning, even on the weekend when I've slept in). Well this morning I didn't brew one, I want to see if I can stave myself off of it. Me and my wife are both huge coffee drinkers, even on our 3rd keurig, but I want to experiment to see if pounds drop off not drinking any for a couple weeks. Here's why coffee is bad:
http://www.cheeseslave.com/30-reasons-to-quit-coffee
* Over 700 volatile substances in coffee have been identified, including more than 200 acids (ick)
* Caffeine raises blood pressure
* Caffeine increases homocysteine (a biochemical that damages artery walls)
* Caffeine promotes arrythmias
* Caffeine seems to give you energy but it is not real energy — only “chemical stimulation”. According to Cherniske, “The perceived ‘energy’ comes from the body’s struggle to adapt to increased blood levels of stress hormones (I doubt our bodies like being tricked)
* Cutting out caffeine can reduce and even eliminate chronic pain. Pain and tension in our bodies are related to the level of stress hormones in our bodies, which caffeine increases (there's that chronic pain in my leg)
* Caffeine damages the nervous system (vonderbar!)
* Coffee, even decaf, taxes your liver (sorry liver)
* Caffeine impairs digestion (aha, that whole food thing, getting closer)
* Caffeine elevates cortisol (which causes the body to convert sugars to fat, there's the weight gain)
* Caffeine taxes the adrenal glands, which in turn negatively affects your thyroid, sex hormones, and your metabolism (Oh thanks coffee, my thyroid regulates my fat burning, my metabolism is the start of fat burning, and I enjoy my sex hormones even if they aren't the right gender)
* Caffeine plays a role in hypoglycemia and blood sugar disorders. “As part of this (flight-or-flight stress) response, the liver rapidly raises blood sugar levels. This is felt as a ‘lift’ by the person who drank the coffee… but the body must then deal with the metabolic emergency of hyperglycemia (elevated blood sugar) (probably shouldn't be messing with the body's sugar levels, there's that fat burning concept again)
* Coffee plays a role in malnutrition. Caffeine causes an increased loss of thiamin and other B vitamins, calcium, minerals, sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium, and zinc (ah, so when my body is stripped of those things, it probably triggers hunger so it can get more of what coffee stripped away)
So basically.. coffee is bad, M'kay?
Another thing I'm changing in my life besides embracing my femme side, losing weight. I think if you asked a hundred crossdressers what the one honest thing they wish they could change about themselves, the majority vote probably isn't going to honestly be I wish I had boobs or a vagina, they probably wish they had a better body. Every crossdresser is stimulated by beauty, and unfortunately we are a vain bunch that enjoy looking at the female body more than most.
I've been heavy pretty much my whole life, even growing up. Well ok, maybe since 8-9 (most kids aren't fat, it's conditioned as they grow up). When I hit high school, I lost a bunch of weight. Not skinny mind you, but major weight loss (I think I was skateboarding a lot). I slowly regained the pounds and remained so well into my 20's. I ate crappy food, I drank tons of soda, no wonder why I was gaining. Then when I turned 35, I decided to start with cutting out soda. This helped tremendously, and I went from probably 335lbs to about 290 and plateaued. I would lose a pound or two here or there but nothing major. Then finally I got really sick for a good 2 weeks, so I wasn't eating hardly anything. Bam, I dropped to 270lbs. Then we started going to the gym, and doing 4-6 5k races every summer, and by 37 I was looking pretty dam good:
I got myself down to 245lbs which is a decent weight being 6'5". This is one of my crossdressed photos when I was at my lowest weight:
So fast forward to today, and I'm back up to about 290lbs. It's not a total relapse, but still not where I want to be. For the last 2-3 months I've been eating healthy lunches, trying to limit sweets, eating soups / salads for dinner, really not losing anything. My wife is also on a planned meal diet, and although she's lost 10lbs, it's the kind of diet that's very calorie restrictive and she should be losing more. Granted we cheat now and then, nothing that should throw us off that badly. Also I question what's causing us to want to cheat. If our bodies are getting what they're supposed to, shouldn't we be able to eat normally? What's causing these cravings?
As you probably noticed, a big portion of america has gotten fatter. Clothes are getting bigger, cars are getting bigger, it's really an epidemic. You can blame HFCS, you can blame fast food, you can blame portion sizes, or maybe just america's laziness. A lot of us have office jobs where we sit most of the day, we get home from a mind draining day and the last thing we want to do is workout. We want to just plop down in front of the TV and eat our dinner and go to bed.
Personally, I avoid HFCS, I avoid fast food, I avoid sugar (I use monk fruit). My daily caloric maximum should be between 2400-2600 calories, and besides snacks my meals range from 250-500 calories so I should be well below that number. Although I don't workout like I should, I also don't just sit on the couch everyday. If I'm not doing household chores nearly every night, I'm working on my hobby. So you would think I could maintain at least a reasonable figure no? Am I getting to that age where I really have to start working hard to fight my body's slowing metabolism? Well I'm getting tired of being good and still having very good results so I started googling around.
First things first, leg cramp. Yea, I was getting a really bad cramp, like if I was standing for more than 20 minutes I'd have to lean on my other leg bad cramps. I thought I was getting some disease, my body was breaking down. Then I discovered what is likely causing leg cramps, oh look aspertame. I was already putting this crap in my body through water enhancers (I use mio now which uses splenda), and to boost that inktake I was chewing a LOT of gum to try to curb my snacking. Read an article not only is the aspertame bad, tricking your body by making it think it's getting food when it's not, only makes you want to eat food. Since cutting both of those out, I feel quite a bit better.
On to the next body hack. What else could be causing my body not to lose weight, something that I know I do a lot of and isn't necessarily something our ancestors (who didn't have weight problems) might not be ingesting. Oh right coffee. Turns out this stuff is bad, and there's probably a good reason why a lot of america is fat, just look how many starbucks there are out there. Now keep in mind, I don't have high calorie coffee (400 calories frappacinos). I brew plain coffee, put in my 15-20 calories of fat free creamer in, add my zero calorie monk fruit, no problem right? Well as it turns out coffee is bad, especially an addicting drug of a drink (I'm guilty, I have 3-5 cups every morning, even on the weekend when I've slept in). Well this morning I didn't brew one, I want to see if I can stave myself off of it. Me and my wife are both huge coffee drinkers, even on our 3rd keurig, but I want to experiment to see if pounds drop off not drinking any for a couple weeks. Here's why coffee is bad:
http://www.cheeseslave.com/30-reasons-to-quit-coffee
* Over 700 volatile substances in coffee have been identified, including more than 200 acids (ick)
* Caffeine raises blood pressure
* Caffeine increases homocysteine (a biochemical that damages artery walls)
* Caffeine promotes arrythmias
* Caffeine seems to give you energy but it is not real energy — only “chemical stimulation”. According to Cherniske, “The perceived ‘energy’ comes from the body’s struggle to adapt to increased blood levels of stress hormones (I doubt our bodies like being tricked)
* Cutting out caffeine can reduce and even eliminate chronic pain. Pain and tension in our bodies are related to the level of stress hormones in our bodies, which caffeine increases (there's that chronic pain in my leg)
* Caffeine damages the nervous system (vonderbar!)
* Coffee, even decaf, taxes your liver (sorry liver)
* Caffeine impairs digestion (aha, that whole food thing, getting closer)
* Caffeine elevates cortisol (which causes the body to convert sugars to fat, there's the weight gain)
* Caffeine taxes the adrenal glands, which in turn negatively affects your thyroid, sex hormones, and your metabolism (Oh thanks coffee, my thyroid regulates my fat burning, my metabolism is the start of fat burning, and I enjoy my sex hormones even if they aren't the right gender)
* Caffeine plays a role in hypoglycemia and blood sugar disorders. “As part of this (flight-or-flight stress) response, the liver rapidly raises blood sugar levels. This is felt as a ‘lift’ by the person who drank the coffee… but the body must then deal with the metabolic emergency of hyperglycemia (elevated blood sugar) (probably shouldn't be messing with the body's sugar levels, there's that fat burning concept again)
* Coffee plays a role in malnutrition. Caffeine causes an increased loss of thiamin and other B vitamins, calcium, minerals, sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium, and zinc (ah, so when my body is stripped of those things, it probably triggers hunger so it can get more of what coffee stripped away)
So basically.. coffee is bad, M'kay?
