The GirlAlive Blog

Cortisol, obesity, and people who need to shut up.

I’m not a doctor, so keep that in mind as I try to explain the processes that follow.

Okay, so I hear a lot about the “obesity epidemic” because I’m fat. I don’t eat donuts all day and I don’t touch fast food. But people like you look at me and think I’m a huge disgusting pig. I know you think that because a percentage of you feel a need to tell me that every time I leave my house.

Here’s the thing, everyone who tells me that I’m fat is just making the fatness problem worse. Let me explain how.

Your adrenal glands produce a hormone called cortisol. They produce a little bit of cortisol all the time to help regulate your blood pressure and metabolism. But if you are stressed, depressed or anxious, your adrenal glands spew out tons of the stuff. And cortisol acts in your blood system a bit like a 4-year-old put in charge of feeding the cat. The 4-year-old (cortisol) will shove as much cat food (carbohydrates) into the cat (fat cells) as possible until the cat is so bloated it can’t walk. Cortisol grabs every free calorie and shoves it directly into your fat cells, making you obese. You have seen this in action if you’ve ever seen someone who is treated with high doses of corticosteroids. They can eat nothing but celery and still gain weight.

So if we put this in the real world, let’s say you have a 12-year-old girl who is a bit of a nerd, with buck teeth and glasses (I’m not going to name any names or anything). Every day of her life is nothing but combat-level stress. She gets teased at the bus stop. She gets bullied on the bus. Then she gets picked-on all day at school. Then she gets physically tortured by her orthodontist until she goes home to be tormented by her big brother. After all that, this girl is a walking cortisol factory. She has cortisol building up in her system during every waking hour because of the stress and depression that plagues her life. So everything she eats whether it is cookies or carrot sticks turns directly into fat.

So this girl grows up and is no longer in grade school, so she should be able to relax and lose some weight, right? Nope. She is picked on by co-workers. She is mocked by complete strangers for being fat. Children point and laugh at her. She can’t watch tv, go on the internet or read a newspaper without hearing about how fat people are the worst thing in the whole world. Her stress level, if it has changed, has only gone up. So she is still a walking cortisol factory. The thing is, the main thing they’re picking on now is her weight, which would not have been an issue at all if she had just been left alone when she was a kid.

I submit to you that we are not facing a crisis caused by fat people or by fast food restaurants. I think that we do not have an “obesity epidemic”. Obesity is just a symptom and by-product of a worldwide asshole epidemic. And obesity will never be cured until skinny people learn to shut the hell up and mind their own business. So go ahead and teach your kids to eat their veggies, but while you’re at it, try teaching them some kindness and tolerance too.

Edinburgh Book Festival

This last weekend I went to see John Green at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I’ll show you some crappy pictures that are really just still shots taken from my video camera.

I also took some video when John was speaking. It is a bit crappy because we were sitting way in the back. My husband is 6′5″, so we didn’t want to block anyone’s view.

Also, while we’re on the subject of nerdfighters, my guinea pig Spike is a nerdfighter.

He has a deformed paw in the front (we don’t know how it happened and it doesn’t seem to hurt him), and the toes are separated like a nerdfighter gang sign.

Uneventful Week and Musings on Editing

This week has been a bit boring. No eye implosions. Just a trip to the JobCentre. There are pretty much no jobs out there, which is why I’ve taken a few steps to keep myself busy.

First of all, there are the Tumblr blogs that I mentioned in the last post. I’ve been reviewing books like crazy, and posting random crap. I also did a favor for my cousin. He needed someone to do a little proofreading, so I gave him an hour of my time to nitpick.

The project I was working on was related to Green Routes. If you live in, or plan to visit the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, and a little of the surrounding area) you need to check that site. It is full of great information about small businesses that try to operate in an environmentally responsible way. And beyond being “green” a lot of the places just look fun and interesting.

Working on proofreading and copy editing things always makes me feel a little defensive. Like, people think that I think I’m smarter than they are because I know a lot about punctuation and spelling. I think some people get paranoid that I’m judging them whenever they make a typo. The truth is, I’m completely aware that spelling and punctuation have basically nothing to do with intelligence. I have friends who can’t spell to save their lives, but they’d kick my ass on any IQ test any day. I just happen to have a talent for English nit-picking. I like editing because it allows me to help some of those smart people sound as smart as they really are.

People also think that I’m probably one of those grammar nazis that trolls all over the internet pointing out everyone’s typos. I’m not. Why should I give out my services all over the internet for free? I notice typos, and usually don’t mention them. Especially when they are perpetrated by people I like. However, there is one situation in which I will use my superpowers for evil. And that is against internet trolls. I hang out at I’m With Coco quite a bit, and every so often we get some obnoxious Leno fan trolling there. Rather than arguing with them, I just correct their grammar and spelling. So the general rule is that I will only tear your grammar apart if you annoy me, or if you pay me. Which I admit is a little weird. I’m like a grammar dominatrix.

New Front Page

If you came here from GirlAlive.com you probably noticed some changes to the front page. You’ll have to excuse the boring buttons. That’s the best I could do with MS Paint. (I’m still trying to recover all the software lost from when my laptop died. It’s pretty much fixed now, but I’m still not back to where I was.)

I wanted to give a quick explanation of what the new buttons are. There is the blog button, which you would have pushed to get here. Then there is the Book Review Blog button. That one takes you to my new book review blog over at Tumblr. Then there is the British Food button, which goes to my British Food reviews, as usual. Then I also added a button for my Twitter feed. Cause I use Twitter quite a bit. Then there is the mysterious “GirlAlive Tumblr” button. That is a secondary Tumblr blog that I created, mostly to do some testing and other stuff for the book blog, but then I decided to keep it as a feed somewhere between this blog and my twitter feed. It’s more information than Twitter, but less than here. It’s mostly where I re-blog stuff that I find amusing or whatever. The kind of things I post on Facebook, but I don’t generally want complete strangers friending me on Facebook. So the Tumblr is there instead. Then the last button is my cafepress shop.

I’ve been saying that I want to get out of cafepress for over a year now, but for the moment nothing will happen with that. I can’t get my original image files back from cafepress, and they’re all on my laptop that was stolen last year. At the moment I don’t have any good image software. So it’ll be cafepress for a while more.

Anyway, that’s the new front page. Lots of buttons for stuff. I’d fill you in on everything else I’m doing, but you’d be so bored. I’ve been looking for a job. Turns out there aren’t any. Besides that, I’ve been lurking on YouTube watching the Vlogbrothers and other nerdfighters, and also playing some KOL, since I hadn’t played for something like two years. If you sat and watched how I spend my day, you’d be bored into a coma.

Oh, and for those on Twitter who heard about my eye problem last week, my eyes are fine. I had a weirdness in one eye when I woke up, so I got checked to make sure my retina was still where it should be. It is fine. I just smooshed my eye in my sleep or something.

My new thing.

I’ve decided to blog about all the books I read. As well as some I have read in the past, since I do not generally finish an entire novel every day. However, I know that many of you don’t give a crap about what what I’m reading, so I’m doing all this over on another blog at tumblr. So here is my new blog:

http://alanaisreading.tumblr.com/

So if you want to read fairly random book reviews and other stuff about authors or reading or whatever, you can go there and follow me if you have a tumblr account. If you don’t have or want a tumblr account, it also automatically posts to Twitter whenever there’s a new post there, so you can follow me on Twitter.

I’m probably not going to generally be mentioning it much from here, so bookmark it now if you care.

Ancient circus tents.

Here’s a conversation I had with my husband while he was asking me trivia questions last night. (Approximated – I didn’t take notes at the time.)

HUSBAND: Where is the largest stone circle in the UK?
GIRLALIVE: I don’t know.
H: Avebury. It’s so big the whole town is inside the circle.
GA: But it might not be so big if the town is all midgets.
H: They’re not midgets.
GA: That would explain the stone circles. They were ancient circus tents.
H: They were not circus tents.
GA: Then how do you explain the midgets?
H: There are no midgets in Avebury!
GA: So you know where all the midgets in the world are? You have a database?
H: No. It’s just that Avebury is not all midgets.
GA: Then why is the whole town inside a giant ancient bigtop?
(HUSBAND glares.)
GA: Doo doo doodle oodle oo doo doo doo. (circus music)
(Husband gives up and asks next trivia question.)

Husband is a great straight man, but not much of an audience.