The Katrina Spread

I talked this weekend with a friend back in Bay St. Louis. It's springtime there, as it is here in Portland. I've got pictures of spring buds posted on my  blog, and everywhere I look there are yellow daffodils and red tulips and green shoots coming up out of the ground. Any other year on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in March and April, you'd likewise be seeing cascades of lavender and white wisteria, hot pink azalea blossoms, purple crepe myrtles, and trees greening out all around you.

This year, everything there is gray.

The saltwater storm surge that covered the Gulf Coast for five hours last August 29 caused great damage (in many cases irreparable) to the trees and other vegetation. For people who have been living in travel campers in the midst of rubble for seven months, this is rather challenging. I was very happy to learn that my friend is taking a trip for a couple of weeks, to a place where there are green fields, and trees with leaves on the branches, and where people live in houses, and have grocery stores and drugstores and libraries and restaurants to go to, and their children attend school in buildings instead of tents.

I mentioned to my friend that my body has been holding on to weight since the hurricane, more than is justified by what I've been eating. (And I haven't even had my shrimp po-boy yet.) When I was in Baton Rouge last October, I bought some jeans to replace the ones that were destroyed, and I can't fit into them now. My friend said that everyone on the Gulf Coast is having the same problem ... they've taken to calling it "Katrina spread". Most people there have either lost a lot of weight or gained a lot of weight. They are averaging a couple of clothes sizes larger than they were seven months ago. Some of it may be due to emotional eating, but these are people who are also working their behinds off physically to put their lives back in order.

I did some research to see if there was something I could do to help my body readjust itself to "normal" living, and found a great book, The Cortisol Connection, about the effects of prolonged stress on the endocrine system, which include weight gain. Basically, when the body operates under "emergency" conditions for an extended period of time, it doesn't process food into energy the way it would under ordinary, safe, everyday conditions. Just as it takes the emotions and mind a while to re-normalize, so, too, with the body.

Comparing notes, my friend and I discovered that we've both turned a corner during the last month. We're feeling more and more "normal", less as if we're in crisis all the time, and ready for there to be more to life than being a "Katrina survivor".

Comments

[Michael]

Hi Kitty,

I have a hypothyroid (well actually my thyroid was 70 per cent enlarged and precancerous so it had to be radiated..as in radiation treatment which basically killed it) then it went from hyperthyroid (where you shed pounds by the second) to hypothyroid where you gain pounds just by breathing....Its a struggle for me daily..add in an irregular heart beat and my body produces too much cholestoral..the end result is I don't drink alcohol, rarely eat desserts, fatty foods, no sodas, rare I have sweets, etc...and still I do cardio daily and I have what I call the 8 to 10 pound bounce in a day (I can go up or down that much in weight) and stress has a tremendous amount to do with weight gain. I feel your pain and anxiety. So, even though I exercise daily with cardio and weight machines and watch my diet, I am still in that mode of body under attack. My doctor is always screaming at me. grrrr!! What I mean to say to you is do your best, get some cardio in, go slow (look at this as a life style..and daily helps a lot....bit by bit...walks, join a low impact gym, maybe yoga (my body just can't do those yoga exercises..I am not limber and tend to be a geek in coordination) and try maybe swimming....just don't beat yourself up over it...your body is in crisis mode and stress mode and so just be aware of food intake (even if you take in less..sometimes the body in stress stores all that food as you said for fear it isn't getting any more...grrr) and try vitamins...that helps...and don't beat yourself up...small baby steps....and remember to breath (I often forget to do that in exercising...and well, um, that's not a good thing.

give yourself lots of hugs..hugs sent from me to you:)

Michael

[Kitty]

Even though I saw how my body changed the way it handled weight during menopause, which of course is also endocrine-related, this has still been surprising to me. It helps to know that it's normal (well, it's a "normal" response to "abnormal" circumstances)and that it won't last forever.