As Queen Lilusays:
""Alright, folks, you know the rules. Join us all in humiliating the crap out of yourself every Thursday by sharing some completely tasteless, wholly unclassy, "how many readers can I estrange THIS week??" TMI story about your life. Or hell,bout someone else's!"
I am in no way, shape or form a good role model. For anyone. God forbid I ever have a daughter. She will have one of the worst people to look up to. Not saying I am a horrible person, just...well, lets just say I like my beer, my cigarettes (though I am attempting to quit those), covering my body with tattoos, and I have had, in the past, some questionable jobs. But one of the biggest ongoing choices I make has to do with diets. I have been on one diet after the other since I was 12 years old and my father's father (I don't call him Grandpa) told me I was disgustingly fat. I think that day is one of the last that involved sitting at the table and eating with my family. I pretty much went on a starvation diet after that, eating a Twix bar and Dr. Pepper in the morning and that was all. I was on track team, I played soccer, I took aerobics classes and ballet/tap/jazz classes. I weighed maybe, MAYBE, 95 lbs in high school. In fact, that's how much I weighed until I discovered beer and liquor. Then I think I gained about 15 lbs, which, of course, made me unhappy. But since then (110 lbs) I have gained another 30 lbs, putting me in the proper weigh zone for my height, but also making me very, very unhappy.
I have tried all sorts of diets, along with my coworkers, including (but not limited to) the cabbage soup diet, the lemonade diet, Weight Watchers, Hydroxycut and alli. And the last one, the alli, is where this story begins.
The way alli works is you take a pill with or within one hour of your three biggest meals. You are limited to 13 grams of fat per meal. The alli blocks something like a 1/4 of the fat from your food (I could be wrong about this fraction, but lets go with it for now) so that your body won't absorb it. This causes slick poos. Not like a horrible mess of a poo, just much, much easier to pass. If, by some chance, you happen to eat more than 13 grams of fat in your meal then it creates what the makers of alli like to call "treatment effects" which is described as "oily or fatty stools" and what looks like "pizza oily" in the toilet. And they aren't kidding. I didn't want pizza for a while after these episodes. I kinda don't want any for a while now, ew.
Anyway, if others out there are like me, then there is not such thing as limiting fat grams, period (hence the weight gain...or maybe its just because I became lazy, I dunno...). But after the first day, nothing. No treatment effects! I figured that maybe it was absorbing all of the fat and I would be a size 0 in no time. Oh, I was wrong. I was so very wrong.
I started it the day before my next day off and in the end (ha!) it was a good idea. The next morning I woke up, did my usual morning thing and guess what? There was pizza oil involved. But it got so much worse. In fact, because I ate such fatty foods like hamburgers and pasta and all the day before, the pill had to work overtime and what it created can only be described as what looked like super dark green olive oil. I wouldn't even let Brett see it, because it was so horribly abmormal. The booklet didn't say anything about that! So I started cramming myself with fruit and salad and pickles for the rest of the day. I was satisfied that I had reversed everything, took my last pill for the day and went to bed.
Next morning, all was good. Not horrible oil slicks or pizza oil. Everything was normal. So I go skipping off to work, confident that all is well. And I was wrong.
The day went by, all nice how everyday should go, until around noon or so. This is when I realized that something wasn't feeling right. I went to the bathroom, figuring, you know, that maybe it was that "special girly time". But what I found was so terrifying that I just kind of stood there and wondered what I was supposed to do. The booklet tells women that they may want to wear a pantyliner in case of any oily spotting, but I had overcome that, right? (plus, I got to wondering, are the men folk supposed to wear pantyliners, too, or just Depends?) Oh no, I had what people in the industry (remember WOW! Potato chips?) like to call "anal leakage" (stop reading here if you need to) and it was bad. I didn't have gas, I guess it just slowly leaked out all day. Man, I am thankful for wearing all black, everyday, to the salon. This woulda been superfly embarassing had I been wearing khaki or white pants.
Anyway, I cleaned myself up as best I could and kinda slinked out to my office. My coworker was sitting at her station reading a magazine, but caught me looking around the corner.
Coworker-Why are you staring at me?
Me-(in a whisper) I think I need to go home for a few minutes....
Coworker-Um, ok...
Me-(in a whisper) I believe I am experiencing (makes the quoties with the fingers) "treatment effects"...
Coworker-What treatment effects?
Me-(totally not in a whisper anymore) it looks like a oil tanker carrying only pizza oil just sunk in my underwear!
Coworker-......
Me-I need to go home and wash up and change my clothes....you know, to get rid of the treatment effects from the alli...
Coworker-The alli? Oh! Oh! Ewwwww! Gross! I am never taking that! Oh my god! Ew! Go!
Yeah.
I called in another stylist to come in early. The thought of this is totally turning my stomach right now.
Anyhoo, so yes. After another day, I was fine. I learned how to control the leakage, but then I was totally over eating bland fat free food. So I stopped taking the alli.
Of course, a few months later I decided to try it again, bound and determined to do it right.
Guess what happened? Yeah, that. Again.
So the moral of the story? Don't take alli.
I'm hungry!
I'm sorry but....bwaaaahahahahaha. It's mean. I know. That's the one thing that's held me back from trying Alli.
You're not going to try it again, right?
Posted by: Filterless Maggie | June 18, 2009 at 07:09 PM
No, oh hell no! It's terrible. Ok, maybe....v
Posted by: Manifest Green | June 18, 2009 at 07:18 PM
I always wondered about that.... :)
Posted by: verybadcat | June 18, 2009 at 07:44 PM
never wonder again...
Posted by: Manifest Green | June 18, 2009 at 07:58 PM
You know what's sad? Because I'm both trying to lose weight and trying not to be constipated all the time, I'm seriously contemplating whether that stuff could solve both of my problems. Chronic dieting is a sick, sick disease, isn't it?
Posted by: Hillbilly Princess | June 20, 2009 at 10:52 AM
I remember reading some similar stories a while back; it wasn't Alli, but it was some other pill with the same effect.
It had a whole list of things you should and shouldn't do for the first few weeks, including carrying around a spare pair of pants...
All I can say is that yet again I am glad I'm a boy, and don't have this whole social obligation to diet.
Also, you should probably just be happy with your current weight and stick with it...! (Yes, feel free to ignore this line. It's my attempt at being helpful.)
Posted by: Sebastian | June 20, 2009 at 06:40 PM
Princess-yes, yes it is....but reading all of the fad diet rules is awesome!
Sebastian-I remember olestra had that effect, but that was the WOW! potato chips...or are you talking about the srink mix for the water? I think it does the same thing. And you are helpful!
Posted by: Manifest Green | June 20, 2009 at 11:34 PM
Olestra! That's the one.
I remember poking around on YouTube for videos, hoping to complete my education on the matter, but (fortunately?) I could not find any at the time.
Posted by: Sebastian | June 21, 2009 at 11:37 AM