So yeah –

I signed up for an MLM. I don’t live in Utah. I am not going to start spamming up your respective Facebook feeds with different Odes to Protein Shakes, I was not promised I’d “make 6 figures in 3 months if I hustle” and believed it. I have simply gotten serious about my health and found to be Shakeology an exceptional product and tool for restoring my health.

I’ve been drinking it for years and it’s the real deal. It’s not a miracle product, there’s no abracadabra when it comes to building health. But for me, for my money, it’s the best shake on the market that I could find and I’ve looked. Really hard.

When I lost both of my parents in my mid thirties to heart disease it made me take a hard look around. I’ve always been heavy, even when I was playing collegiate water polo and worked out for 4 hours a day. I watched my mom gain and lose 100lbs 3x over her life time. Think about that for a second. Three (3) times. I saw my dad carry 200 extra pounds for most of his life and still have a brilliant, meaningful life. We just had to shop at different stores than most.

But when I went into grief counseling after I lost my mom (and having lost my dad 2 years before her) I learned a lot of things about myself. In my grief I started unpacking a lot of “parent stuff” and with my mother there was a lot of body stuff that went with it. She always had this antagonistic relationship with her body. It was something to conquer, resent, and begrudge. It was difficult to watch. Being the only daughter and the sympathetic person that I naturally am, I absorbed a lot of her dysfunctional ideas and coping mechanisms. I knew I had to work on my relationship with food, I knew that was the crux of it all but what took me a long time to find was the why, my why.

For some girls wanting to date and be socially accepted is reason enough to take off the weight. But if someone passes on me or doesn’t want to be my friend because of my weight?  Eff that and them. I’m amazing. I don’t owe anyone thin or pretty and I never have. Neither do any of you reading this for that matter. Fat was and is the perfect litmus test for potential boyfriends or friends. It filters all the a-holes out. It perfectly exposes them for what they are. American body norms and fatism being the last acceptable prejudice have done all that footwork for me. So that wasn’t reason enough, not for me. Also, because I’d seen what “diet and exercise” resulted in with my mom it wasn’t something that made any sense to me. That wasn’t a good enough why.

For some it’s a matter of health and by virtue of stubborn Scottish Highlander genetics I’ve done and am doing amazing in that section of life. I’ve had doctors take a look at my blood test at my yearly physical and then look up at me, then back down at the numbers and then ask me to confirm my social security number. There’s room for improvement, sure. Being more fit is always on the To Do list but nothing, health-wise, is a heavy burden right now. <knocks on wood> Doctors are some of the most offensive fatistists I’ve ever come across by the way. I’ll come in with a bad cough needing penicillin and they’ll take up an hour out of my day trying to convince me in their best preschool teacher voice that gastric bypass surgery is a good idea, which it’s not. A 30% recurrence rate in the first year and 60% over 5 years are not reassuring numbers. Irreparable damage to my body is also a deal breaker. So that wasn’t a very strong why either –

But I will tell you what is a strong why; a conversation I had with my dad once talking about typing speeds.

My dad could type faster than anyone I had ever met. When I was a little girl, like 8 or 9 I remember him having this typewriter in his home office and he would get going so fast you couldn’t hear the break in the clicks, just this continuous sound. My dad loved computers and knew they were the future so instead of making us kids practice piano he made us all practice Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I was horrible at it. I lost that game every time and in one particular car ride where it was just us I said something along the lines that I’ll never be as good or fast at typing as him and he got really serious on me. He told me “Sweetheart- it’s your job to be better than me. Faster than me. Smarter than me. At everything. Typing, running, cooking, swimming, thinking, reading, everything. That’s how we progress as a species. That’s the only way. You will type faster than me eventually. You were built to.”

I’ve never forgotten that conversation. That’s how we progress as a species. You were built to.

Heart disease took my dad at 59. He was carrying 200 extra pounds and never got diagnosed with diabetes, just high blood pressure and walked on his own volition till the day he died. He took a nap one day after working for part of a Saturday, had a heart attack and never woke up. Heart disease was a major player in my mom’s death 2 years later.

It’s not going to get me.

Being my father’s daughter I went straight to the library and the internet to find out everything I could about heart disease aside of the high fat, red meat, butter and heavy cream cautionary tale that I’ve been told since I was a kid. That didn’t make too much sense to me either. Human have been eating fat for millennia and heart disease is only a 50yo plague. My search led me here and here and a number of other places including this amazing book that made EVERYTHING make sense to me.

If obesity is caused by a poor diet and lack of exercise why are 6 month old babies that only drink their mother’s milk and don’t have the physical capacity to exercise obese?
Why are there people who weigh 230 lbs that can train for and run the Los Angeles Marathon and not drop down to a normal weight? Why did my mom try everything from liquid diets to counting points but did nothing but yoyo her whole life? All of the health advice I’ve gotten from purported experts had yuuuge gaps in it which made me doubt it. Also, they rarely worked in any real sense. I’m going to take off the weight but I’m only doing it once which means I need and want to figure out the most correct way.

Then straight out of Toronto comes Dr. Jason Fung – a Canadian endocrinologist – so someone who has been trained in and is at liberty to practice medicine independent of the pressure and corrupting force of a bottom line and Big Pharma looking over your shoulder and smashing her boobs against your back. He’s figured it out. It’s insulin resistance and the way to fix it is to bring your insulin levels down, essentially. I heartily recommend his book and all his YouTube lectures.

This makes sense to me which in turn has led me to the Keto way of life.

Beachbody perfectly fits into Keto living and I am mad as hell at sugar companies, their invasion into my food supply, their roll in killing my parents, and the havoc they’ve reeked on my body and country. Sugar’s tendency to hijack your brain is also a little concerning and I’m still figuring out how abstaining from sugar in my church community where our only vices are “shoes and chocolate chip cookies” according to my mom.

I’ve read a lot of Beachbody and different kinds of health journeys and, I’m not going to lie, it’s sometimes hard not to roll my eyes when someone wants to talk about “their journey” but what I get now is that in a world like our where everything about you that’s not your body is generally perceived as completely secondary, when you chose to work on your body, you’re literally remaking your place in the world. It’s a biology project, sure, but because of the socio/emotional climate we live in, when you physically remake yourself, you are doing an emotional renovation on literally ever aspect of your life and carving a new place for yourself in the social order of things. I wish thin privilege wasn’t a thing but it is and moving from one way of life to another is, in fact, a journey. Not just an empty adage.

That’s what’s worth writing about. It’s worth announcing on Facebook. It’s shakes, sure. But it’s also a story worth sharing. We all flock to a transformation story, a come back or a make over. Because I believe that deep down, we all know and recognize that this mechanism of change, this struggle, that it’s essential because it’s how we progress as a species. It’s what we were built to do and its always better and easier to do something that drastic and important together.