For me, being sad or depressed can have one of two effects on my eating. I either binge eat with no end in sight or stave off food until I am absolutely starving and make bad choices.

Recently, I have been going through a rough time emotionally, and have gained back some of the weight I had been losing which only feeds the negative emotions. Thankfully, I am lucky enough to have an amazing group of friends and family help me through all of this, but it is still frustrating to have gained back weight that you had hoped to shed forever.

How do I work at stopping my emotions from controlling my eating? It is something I will definitely have to research.

One of my favourite sources for news is Canoe.ca. I jump over to that site two or three times a day to see what they’ve put up and today, I almost removed them from my daily feed due to an article they decided to highlight heavily in their main featured stories block regarding being fat.

Entitled Why’d You Let Yourself Get So Fat?, here is a short bit from the article:

I just don’t get it.

Why do people let themselves get fat?

There’s no possible excuse for not knowing how bad it is to be overweight.

Diabetes, heart disease, on and on. Just a great big drain on the health system.

Nobody admires a fat person. Nobody sees a fat person as attractive.

A fat person walks in the room, everybody looks and thinks, “my, he or she is fat.”

All kinds of assumptions are made. And you know what? Most of those assumptions are probably right.

The fat person lacks discipline, lacks self-control.

I couldn’t believe that Canoe would allow their site to be the host of such ridiculous, idiotic writing. While the comments have been a buzz with people both criticizing the writer and defending him, I feel like the tone of the article leans towards mean, and lacks the empathy that is needed with regards to situations such as this.

I have struggled with obesity, and I don’t need anyone to rub such things in my face. His post belittles the effort I am putting into my weight loss and just makes me angry. Maybe that was his intention, but I don’t believe that Canoe should support such small minded people on their platform.

At a few different points in my life, I thought about joining the Canadian Armed Forces. Once as a summer job to earn money for college, and twice as a viable means of using what I had learned in College to make some money, but I have been overweight longer than I can remember, and the skinniest points in my life have been while training to get into the Military, and even then I was overweight.

I ran across an interesting article on Slate, which talks about the US Army’s stance on overweight recruits.

Because of increasing obesity rates in the United States, the Army’s standards now disqualify a large percentage of the population. A study conducted by Army researchers found that 27.1 percent of the 18-year-olds who applied to join the military in 2006 were overweight—up from 22.8 percent in 1993. Weight is by far the most common medical reason why potential recruits are rejected from serving. And while prospective enlistees can try to make weight before their official screening—often with the support of eager recruiters—the pool of eligible young adults remains smaller than the Army would like.

In the end, it looks like the Army is allowing overweight recruits in based on their ability to do important jobs, but then sometimes filter them out based on their inability to get to the ideal weight.

It is an interesting issue, and one that will become more pressing as the fighting age men and women of the highly developed countries get fatter and fatter.

Sometimes, I do wish I had taken on the military lifestyle in part because it might have helped me kick my weight issue, but I don’t think I was ready at that time to be a soldier or to be skinny, and one thing that people don’t realize is that weight loss is definitely a mindset. You can’t be rushed into wanting to lose weight, nor will you be consistently successful if you aren’t in the right frame of mind.

I am sure many of you are wondering where I have been and how I am doing, and let me start by saying that my weight loss is still going well, and it is only my energy for blogging that has been low lately.

I am currently at 246 lbs, which is the lowest I have been in a year and means I have lost only 14 lbs since starting this endeavour, but the scale continually shows progress, despite being slow.

The reason for the slow down in posting is because of an upcoming change in career, news that I will be a dad in seven months, and a new addition to our family with a small puppy named Molly who doesn’t sleep well at night.

The upside of getting the dog though is that I am getting outside more, going for long walks, and getting a tan, as the weather improves quickly here in South Western Ontario.

I am going to start posting around three to five items a week again in this blog, and continue to work on getting myself fit. I really want to make sure I have a fair bit of weight off by the time my son or daughter is born so that I have the energy to keep up with him or her as they grow up.

I have left the Trim Water in my fridge the last few days since receiving the package so that they would be properly cooled, and because I have been insanely busy.

Today I will be tasting each one, and trying to relay my thoughts and feelings on each of the six flavours I received.

One of the things I have found out from David Sackler is that there are two flavours I am missing here today: Peach Mango and BlackCherry Blackberry. I thought about waiting on my taste test since the Peach Mango really interests me, but I wanted to get started and give you guys as much information about these products as I can. I will hopefully get to try the last two flavours at some point and time, giving you details on the full product line of Trim Water.

I will take a sip of the drink, leave it in my mouth, swallow it, and then immediately try another sip. Between flavours I will cleanse my pallette with water, and other than not spitting, this will hopefully be a little like a text version of Gary Vaynerchuk’s amazing Wine Library TV video show.

I am going to start with the flavour I am not really excited about and work my way from there, as I know from my own experiences with other beverages, which ones I am more likely to personally enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »