The Journey of a Thousand Miles...

Blind spots

2010-09-25T14:41:00.002-05:00

I have come a long way in terms of establishing a more comfortable relationship with my physical self. While I'm not as proactive as I ought to be, in terms of physical activity and healthy choices, I'm kinder to myself than I once was. I nurture my body by treating it to a massage or pedicure now and again. I take vitamins, I take my diabetes meds, and I take care to dress in ways that I hope are flattering. Perhaps the biggest change of all is that I don't hate my appearance any longer. While I'm not excited, exactly, about the way I look, I'm at peace with it now.

I remember in college, having episodes of self-loathing so intense that I had to force myself to walk out of the restroom and back into the classroom after break. I felt so ... unacceptable the way I was, and I was just embarrassed by my own existence. Of course, I look back at photos of myself from that time, and I'm amazed at how completely wrong that perspective was. I was a perfectly, unremarkably fine looking young woman. Not a supermodel, but also certainly not the one-woman sideshow I'd imagined that I was.

So it's gotten better. I typically don't spend a ton of time worrying about how I look, other than that I try to choose fun outfits for work, and I like it when my hair looks a certain way... all the stuff that we all think about, and usually only for about an hour in the morning. But there's been this ongoing thing with this co-worker that has made me feel much more self-conscious, and I'm struggling with how to handle it. He's a bit younger than I am, and very attractive (as verified by some of my other female co-workers) and very well put together. And he's been paying attention to me in ways that feel both good and bad. We see each other only at a weekly meeting, and we sit next to each other and just chat for a minute or two before the meeting begins. Last week he asked if I'd gotten my hair cut (which I had). I said yes and he said "See how good I am?" and gave me a thumbs up. This week, he asked if I'd been working out. I said that I had, a bit, and he nodded and gave me another thumbs up.

I was flattered, of course, but also... yeek. It feels uncomfortable to think that someone male is paying enough attention that those changes register with him. Further, it feels uncomfortable to have him say something about it. I wonder what his motivation is, and that's where things get weird for me. The most obvious interpretation is one of interest. Dude wants to let me know that he finds me attractive. But even typing that feels all wrong. I feel like it couldn't possibly be about me, as if he doesn't actually find me pretty, but he's bored and is just doing a little idle flirting to pass the time at a boring meeting. Or worse, that he's teasing the class fat girl somehow. I do have some experience with being that class fat girl, and being the recipient of some ugly attention from the boys in the class. But adults don't do that to each other. I understand this, and I understand that those experiences, nasty as they were, were over 30 years ago. They're not relevant to this situation. And yet, up they come.

The tough part here is that I'm usually pretty good at reading people and at knowing what's up with them. But I can't tell here, and I can't tell for a variety of reasons. One is that this particular guy is pretty guarded and quiet, and I don't see him except for at this weekly meeting. So I have little information about him, except for the pre-meeting snippets of chat. But the bigger thing, I think, is that this whole interaction hits a decades-old sore spot for me. Much as things have gotten better in my relationship with my physical self, I still feel like there's a blind spot there. I don't always see the pitiful, awful looking girl I used to see, but nothing coherent has taken the place of that image yet. That's an uncomfortable feeling, and it's highlighted by these interactions.

So what do I do? Continue to nurture myself, I suppose, in the ways that I already know how to do. Continue to slowly lose weight and seek out activity, because those are healthy choices to be making. And begin to assemble a new, updated inner vision of myself, maybe even giving private thanks to this gentleman and the dis-equilibrium he has created, since in it is the opportunity for change.

Uncomfortable

2010-09-12T02:52:00.002-05:00

I can't sleep. It's 2:53 a.m., and I've been awake in bed for a while, simmering and cranky and feeling just uncomfortable in my own skin. My hair is touching my neck wrong, my skin feels too dry, my knee and foot ache, my back itches, I am pre-menstrual and bloaty and BLEAH.

The timing is odd in one sense, given that this has been a kind of self-indulgent weekend thus far. I got my hair cut and a pedicure, both of which usually make me feel a fresh and smooth and perky. Hormonally, though, I get it. PMS hits me in a variety of ways. There's not always an emotional component, though when there is it's usually this restless crankiness or a sort of sad, lonely feeling of disconnection. Physically, though, it's pretty predictable. I get carb cravings like you wouldn't believe, and I pack on some water weight that stays with me for a week or so.

I have to say, much as I don't enjoy this, it's way better than it used to be. In college, I had all of this, plus crazy cramps that were occasionally completely incapacitating. Discovering ibuprofen (recently over-the-counter when I went to college in 1984) improved the quality of my life one week out of the month by giving me some control over the pain issue. But I continue to feel this sense of wanting to crawl out of my skin (and then go drown my cranky inner child in ice cream and margaritas).

Feeling comfort in my body has always been an issue for me. I've certainly come a long way. I think of my young self in middle school and high school, struggling to come to terms with this woman's body that feels awkward and uncontrollable. I was one of those girls who ends up with a womanly body earlier than most--in 5th grade I was nearly as tall as I am now, and I had the breasts and hips of a much older girl. I understood that as fat, though looking back, it really wasn't. But I also needed glasses, and got acne, and got braces, a good two years before my classmates did. So while they were mostly still knobby-kneed kids, I was coping with the life-explosion that is puberty, and it just didn't go that well. I didn't know how to dress or care for my new body, and I ended up mostly trying to hide it and myself. I have such visceral memories of feeling terribly uncomfortable in clothes that didn't fit, in a body that didn't seem to fit.

Those memories give me perspective. It still isn't easy, and sometimes my relationship with my body is more adversarial than I'd like. But there's so much more that I know now. I STILL have acne (sigh...35 years later), but I know what to do about it and how to keep it under control. I know that the shape of my body works with some clothes and not others, and I know where to go to find things that will likely work for me. I know what kind of makeup I like, and that I like my toes polished and my fingers not. God knows there's still plenty of room for improvement, but remembering what it used to be like is kind of a comfort on this uncomfortable night.

Are you there, blogosphere? It's me, Luna.

2010-09-05T20:41:00.002-05:00

Ahem. Well... It's been a while, eh? A couple of years at least, during which time my life has changed in some important ways, and stayed the same in some others.

Some of the changes:

My father passed away
I finished graduate school
I landed a permanent job as a psychologist
I bought a house
I got a dog

So, some good developments, some rough ones. I reviewed the last several postings from when I was last here, and I was writing a lot about my father's health issues. Those finally got the best of him in August of 2008. My mother passed away in 1996, so my father's passing left me a 42 year old orphan. I felt every bit the orphan and not so much the 42-year-old, or what I imagined a 42-year-old ought to feel like, particularly one who had recently purchased a house and gotten a permanent job.

I feel...more stable now. It's been two years since that turbulent time in my life. The house, shared with the world's coolest pit bull terrier, feels like mine. The career, shared with the world's coolest colleagues, feels like mine. My life, mostly, feels like mine. Things generally feel comfortable and familiar.

Among those familiar things is my ongoing struggle with weight and health. My weight has been fairly steady in the last two years, topping out at about 238. A few months ago, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, which I suppose merits a spot on the "changes" bullet list above, but I'd rather bury it in a paragraph and deny the fundamental significance of it. As a result of the diagnosis I've been forced to focus more on my health (despite half-hearted attempts at denial), and I've slowly begun to lose some weight. As of yesterday, I'm at 219.5. My progress has been slow, by design...I've been losing about a half a pound every week or so. This seems to be working for the time being.

I've been thinking about small ways to support a healthier lifestyle. I walk daily with my dog, which she loves. I have been taking care to nurture my physical self as well, to remind myself that my body is worth doing nice things for. I get pedicures, I buy good bath products, and I try to remain on friendly terms with this physical self that I inhabit. After so many years of war, small acts of kindness toward my body are significant and help to maintain the truce we've agreed upon.

And I have missed writing here. I don't know exactly what direction future posts will take, but I know that I need a place to think about all of these issues: food, body, diabetes, activity, health... all the big things I've always wrestled with.

So I'm back, continuing this journey, with the understanding that the train never pulls into the station, and so I'd better make the trip worth it.

Seasonal Slump

2008-02-24T12:43:00.001-06:00

It's been a chaotic few months, and something about the waning of winter is encouraging me to pull myself together and get things in order a bit.

I don't feel like I suffer from seasonal affective disorder, exactly, but I do feel like there's a part of me that just doesn't cope well with the dark and cold of winter. All I want to do is eat and sleep, and I find that I'm draggy and tired all the time. This is probably pretty par for the course around here, as our winters (and this one in particular) take a lot of fortitude to endure. But I don't make it easier on myself; when I'm low in energy and/or mood I tend to indulge myself with lots of tasty carbohydrates, which just make me more draggy and tired.

Last weekend I decided to cook. I made a pork loin marinated in citrus juice, garlic, cumin and oregano, and it was really nice. I also made an egg casserole kind of a thing that was good but very, very rich. I've been taking these things for lunch all week, and lo and behold...I'm feeling a little better. A little more in control. And thank goodness.

I was sitting with a cup of tea this morning and thinking about what I really want for myself. I realized that it's more complicated than just lookin' hot and feelin' groovy. That's a part of it, sure, but it's also about feeling calm and in control, and about respecting myself. And about having a body that's functional, so I don't have to worry about being able to go on a hike or climb several flights of stairs, or...well, you get the idea.

So often I just feel like a cork bobbing on the open sea, with very little to say about what happens to me, food-wise. I totally lose sight of the fact that I have a choice about what I eat, and not to choose is still a choice. It all just feels so thoughtless and automatic. I go to the cafeteria at work, and I pick what to eat based on where the shortest line is. Oh, and I get something for dessert, because the Little Debbie rack is right by the cashier, and I like those, and why not? And I drift through the grocery store, just impulse shopping.

So I think the trick for me will be to live a little more intentionally. I'm headed over to the grocery in a bit, and I'll go with a list. Winter's over yet, but it feels good to be thinking these thoughts and planning for the sunshine and warmer weather.

Adventures in Feminine Hygiene: The Sequel

2008-02-13T22:36:00.002-06:00

So, I'm finishing up my second cycle with the menstrual cup (aka the CooterCap), which I first wrote about here. I have to say, I LOVE this thing. For me it is absolutely leak-proof, and surprisingly it's less messy than tampons as well. I also love the idea that I'm not putting bleached and otherwise chemically-processed fibers into or in close proximity to my body, and then I'm not throwing them out where they can sit in a landfill or the bottom of a lake forever. Oh, and the one-time investment? That too. It's all good.

The accounts I read prior to trying it out all talked about a learning curve, and there's definitely been one. I'm just now getting comfortable enough with insertion and removal that it's not a bit of a production, as it was when I first used it. And I can imagine that for anyone not used to having fairly...uh, intimate contact with her body, it might take a bit longer to get really in the swing of the whole thing. But for me, keeping at it has paid off. It's become easy, convenient and comfortable. I wish I'd gotten one 20 years ago.

So. I highly recommend the cup--it's a nice thing to do for your body, your wallet and the environment.

Visit with Dad

2008-02-07T23:27:00.000-06:00

I went out to visit my father this weekend. He's been having cardiac issues and isn't taking very good care of himself, which landed him in the hospital last week. It was scary. My relationship with my father has always been complicated, and it's no less so now. It was so difficult to see him looking frail and scared; as someone who's never been seriously ill, I can only imagine how frightening that is. He is 81 and has never made healthy choices--he smoked until he was about 55, never exercised after about age 30 and is a perfect Type A personality. Oh, and eating habits? Red meat all the way, baby, with some pasta and bread now and again. But vegetables? Ha. If it grows in the dirt, it's not going in his mouth.

So years of hard livin' have caught up with him. He needs a valve replacement and is beginning to suffer from congestive heart failure, as well as arthritis that is beginning to create some mobility issues. My angry, temperamental, larger-that-life father has become a frail, vulnerable little old man who doesn't make great choices for himself, and I just don't know how to be with him.

What happened last week was that his kidneys temporarily quit working (the dye from a CAT scan he had was toxic enough to shut them down) and he ended up with fluid collecting in his lungs. He got more and more short of breath, to the point that he was having trouble walking from his bedroom to the kitchen. Finally a friend of his came by and saw the shape he was in, and he bundled my father up and took him to the hospital. A week of oxygen, balanced meals and diuretics in the hospital, and he was feeling much better by the time I got there this past Friday.

During my weekend there, my brother and I tried to get some more support for him around the house, which he's always been resistant to. He has finally agreed to have home health people come in three times a week to do a little cooking, help him run errands and make sure he's not sitting in front of the TV with his lungs filling up again. I repeatedly found myself lecturing him about needing to make better choices about his health, be proactive about some of these changes that need to get made, etc.

And that made me feel like a big hypocrite. I mean, how proactive am I? How healthy are my choices? The only difference between us is that I'm 41 instead of 81. Well, that and the smoking, and the personality variables, and...OK, so there are plenty of differences. But I see myself in him too--a person with a demanding life who just wants to come home from work and eat tasty, comforting food that she doesn't have to think about. Who doesn't want to have to motivate herself to go to the damned gym after working all day. Who is good at ignoring the signs that her body sends that it would like to be healthier and fitter.

All this has also been strangely motivating. In the last few weeks, whenever I've been dragging my feet about getting to the gym, I picture my father, with his bad joints and poor cardiac health, and it gets me there. I'd prefer not to be coping with these issues when I get older, obviously. I'd like to be one of those 80 year old ladies who's able to work in her garden, walk her dog, travel and generally feel energetic and engaged in the world. And that's not going to happen for me if I just sit here and ignore the fact that my knees hurt and I get short of breath easily even now, at 41.

What I did on my Winter Vacation

2008-01-23T21:56:00.000-06:00

Well, I’m back. I made it through the holidays and through a surprisingly pleasant week-long visit with my father. Since I’ve been back in my own space and my own life I’ve been coping with the January blahs…it’s UNBELIEVABLY cold here, and gray, and I’ve struggled with the desire to eat nothing but carbs, drink like a fish and sleep too much. Actually, I’ve managed to keep the drinking and sleeping under control, but as usual, it’s the demon carbs that have proved irresistible.

Here’s a funny thing. I ate a lot around the holidays and gained about five pounds. I’m up to about where I was when I started this blog, which I’m not thrilled about. Interestingly, though, I’ve had several people in the last few weeks say “Hey, have you lost some weight?” I’m really not at all sure how to understand this…at first I was thinking it was due to Pilates, but I only went three times before my gym-buddy and I abandoned it for the holidays. So I don’t think it’s that. I don’t have an answer, but it makes me feel as if all is not lost.

I do, however, feel like most of the momentum I had throughout the fall is just gone. I’ve been completely unable to get myself to the gym, despite knowing full well that I’ll feel better, sleep better, have more energy, feel prouder of myself, etc. if I do. I’ve been playing games with myself, like telling myself that I can’t listen to any of the music on my iPod unless I do it at the gym. And like the stubborn child I am inside, I reply “Fine.” And the iPod sits on m desk, while I sit on the couch and watch TV.

Life is fairly stressful these days…my father continues to have health problems that appear to be getting worse, and I feel unsure of how to help. More to the point, I feel unsure of how to be close to him and how to be supportive while he’s feeling worried and scared. I know that I would feel more in control if I were to eat better and exercise. I also know that that control would be an illusion, but it’s one I’d welcome at this point.

Thank you to those of you who have sent me holiday greetings or otherwise left kind comments. Squilla, I was happy to hear that you’re alive and well in Australia, and your man is there with you now. *S*, thank you for your regular presence here—it’s always nice to hear from you. You too, Meegan, and Erin. I’ve been reading all of your blogs, even though I’ve been commenting only sporadically. Maybe what I need to do to to foster some re-engagement in the process of caring for my physical self is to blog more frequently and to get back in the habit of thinking about my physical self. That I can do.

Here’s wishing you all a wonderful 2008, with much happiness, good health and inner peace.

Happy Holidays

2007-12-19T21:57:00.000-06:00

I leave tomorrow for a week--I'll be at my father's house in Denver. I'm hoping for a little more sun than we've had in the gloomy Midwest.

And for all of you, whether you celebrate Chanuka, Festivus, the Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa or a special day of your own devising...I hope your holidays are bright and happy. Thank you all for being a lovely part of my 2007. Here's wishing all of us a peaceful, joyful and healthy 2008.

Adventures in Feminine Hygiene

2007-12-14T16:57:00.000-06:00

As I’ve gotten older, my periods have gotten lighter and lighter. I even have an IUD (the copper kind, not the progesterone kind), which is infamous for resulting in very heavy periods. Not for me. My periods are light enough now that my faithful friend the OB tampon just doesn’t work well for me any more, and as a result, I’ve started using ultrathin maxi pads. Ick. I’ve never used pads; from the very start of my menses, some 30 years ago now, I’ve used tampons. But now there just isn’t enough flow to warrant their use; they’re uncomfortable and leave me all dried out and…well, it’s just not working. And the pad thing? Not loving it.

So. What else? I’ve known about and been sort of interested in the idea of the menstrual cup for several years, but I had never tried one. I bought a box of Instead, the disposable ones once, and they just don’t work for me, though I know people who use and like them. Besides, part of what I’ve liked is the idea that I could use something repeatedly rather than discarding one or more of them daily. There are cups made of silicone or rubber that you insert, remove, wash and reinsert. It seemed like it might be time to try one, so I ordered one from this website and received it last week.

It’s a MoonCup, and it looks like a cute little silicone bell, or a little hat (a friend of mine, who disapproves of all the Goddessy names given by the manufacturers, dubbed mine the CooterCap. Fine with me.). I have read about how it takes some time to get used to using them, so I wasn’t expecting my CooterCap to become my BFF the moment I unwrapped it. But still. My first couple of interactions with it have been less friendly than I expected. Granted, I don’t have my period now, and many people have said that it’s hard to practice when you’re not menstruating, so I assume that’s part of my problem. The first time, I was able to insert the Cap OK, but then I couldn’t get it out. I’m not a person who has any problem interacting with her anatomy on a fairly intimate basis…so I wasn’t afraid to stick my fingers in there and get to tugging. But it had formed a fairly strong bond with the wall of my vagina, which I think is the point—that’s how you prevent leaks. It took a few tense minutes to figure out how to break the seal and extract the CooterCap, and then it kind of boinged out of my hand and across the bathroom.

Hm. Trial two, which was a couple of days ago, didn’t go that well either. Insertion went smoothly—you’re supposed to fold the Cap up in a particular way, slide it in and then let it open once it’s inside you. I folded and slid, and then felt it open up, as promised. And, OW. It felt like someone was poking me from the inside with their knuckles. Damn. Fortunately, removal was easier this time.

So, despite these difficulties, I’m looking forward to trying to use the CooterCap during an actual period. I’ve read repeatedly that it takes 2 or 3 cycles before you really get the hang of it, so I’m remaining optimistic. I really do like the idea of less waste, a one-time expenditure (though at this point, near the tail-end of my menstruating career, how much am I really saving, for either the environment or my wallet?) and the potential for a method without the drawbacks of either pads or tampons.

I’ll report back…And in the meantime, if you're interested in learning more, there's a nice little tutorial here.

Thin Dreams Die Hard

2007-12-03T22:39:00.000-06:00

I’ve been consumed lately with the un-fun task of getting my grandmother’s estate underway and debating with my siblings the merits of keeping farmland vs. selling it off. Ugh. In the midst of all this, a friend sent me a link to a post over at Shapely Prose, and it really hit home. It’s all about the things we tell ourselves will be different when we’re thin. Have you done this? God knows I have. For years I’ve had this running list in my head:

Once I’m thin…

I’ll find a fantastic man.
I’ll be more outgoing.
I’ll travel more, and to more exciting places.
People will find me more interesting.
I’ll smell better.
I’ll be fitter.
I’ll be outdoorsy and will learn to love kayaking, hiking, snowshoeing, etc.
I’ll be happier.

Wow. WTF? I could go on and on with this list. It’s absurd. The post at Shapely Prose talks about self-acceptance, both of body size and of the strengths and limitations that make up a personality. It talks about understanding that the things we’re not good at, or are afraid to do, or don’t like to do, are not necessarily because of our weight. They’re because of who we are, for better and worse.

Me? I’m not especially outgoing, and that’s not going to change if I’m a size 10 instead of a size 20. People already seem to find me interesting. I have already traveled to some pretty cool and exciting places, thanks. I’m pretty sure that the outdoorsy thing just isn’t me—I’m darn fond of a comfy bed at the end of the day, and I don’t really like being hot, or cold, or not having access to indoor plumbing at will. Give me museums, cities and culture any day. Those things may be a little easier on the feet at a lower weight, but would it change what I like, what I choose to do and what I’m good at if I lost weight? Of course not.

And yet. It’s hard to give up the fantasy. It’s hard not to continue to believe in parts of it, like the one about the fantastic man. Do I know big women who have found wonderful men? Of course. And I also know that it’s my feelings about my fat, rather than my fat itself, that gets in my way. I know this. And yet.

What are some of your thin fantasies?

The Best We Could

2007-12-01T17:55:00.000-06:00

So. It’s been a couple of weeks, and eventful ones. The day after I wrote the post before this one, I got a call from a cousin telling me that my grandmother was not doing well. I drove down to central Illinois to see her, and I was shocked by how much she had faltered since my last visit, which was only three weeks before. The retirement home staff told me that a good friend of hers had passed away a few weeks earlier, and she had essentially decided that she was finished. She had stopped eating and stopped taking her medication.

So I called my brothers and my cousin, and eventually everyone got down there to be with her. She died on the following Monday the 19^th. I miss her, but it’s hard to be sad for her, in a way. She was 99 years old and had been ready to move on for several years. She had told me many times in the last few years that she has outlived everyone—her siblings, her husband, her two daughters and most of her friends. As we sat together in the hospital that last weekend, she said “I’m 99 years old. I’ve had a good life and a good family. I don’t want to be 100.” She died as she lived—a tough, stubborn woman who knew what she wanted and made it happen.

I always had a kind of difficult relationship with her. I have one cousin; she’s four years older than I am and has always made more conventional life choices than have I. Even when we were kids and teenagers, she was learning to cook and sew, and I was reading and drawing. Her family lived in a small community nearby, mine had moved away from the Midwest when I was a baby and had always lived in the suburbs of big cities. With the benefit of grownup perspective I see that my cousin was just more familiar to my grandmother. They made sense to one another. But growing up I always felt unappreciated and unseen.

Once my mother died, I tried to get closer to my grandmother as a way to stay connected to that side of the family. I remember trying really hard to think of things she would want to do with me (cards? Scrabble? Looking through antique books? Drives in the country?). I once spent a bunch of time researching a particular kind of glassware that she collected so that we’d have something to talk about when I came to visit. None of it worked, really, and ultimately I just had to learn to be content with our imperfect connection. One day we were talking on the phone as I was nearing the end of graduate school, and she said to me “I don’t really understand what you do, but I’m sure proud of you.” That brings tears to my eyes even now. I still wish we had learned not to be such strangers to each other, but I think we both did the best we could.

Vulnerable

2007-11-16T23:06:00.000-06:00

A friend asked me tonight if I’m feeling vulnerable lately. Me? Vulnerable? I immediately listed off all of the ways that I’m not at all vulnerable: a stable, well-paying job, a bunch of good friends, wonderful siblings, a fine apartment, etc. But I heard myself blathering around the question and tossing out all kinds of words meant to express that OK, perhaps I am feeling something, but it’s not vulnerability, for heaven’s sake. Maybe disorganized, unmoored, at sea, not grounded…any of those. My friend kindly let the euphemism-mill slowly wear itself down, and what was left was that word.

So yeah. Vulnerable. I guess so.

It’s a couple of things, I think. The holidays are coming, which are never my favorite time of year. They remind me of how much I miss my mother, who died several years ago. Since then, I pretty much hold my breath starting about now and wait for January 2. More immediately, my father and grandmother are both experiencing health problems and are both old enough that anything could signal the beginning of the end for either of them. My relationship with both of them has been complicated, so my feelings about their mortality are complicated too. And though I am 41 years old, an independent and gainfully employed adult, I suddenly don’t really feel old enough to negotiate a parentless and grandparentless world.

Vulnerable is exactly the word.

Boys are Scary

2007-11-10T23:18:00.000-06:00

Just in the last few weeks I’ve had some interactions with men that were sort of …flirty, I guess. This is a surprise to me, and I don’t ever quite know what to do in response. Or if I want to respond, even. It’s a very confusing issue for me. In one instance, a friend and I had stopped into a small jewelry store, where most of the stuff was made by the proprietor himself. He offered to fix my friend’s necklace while we browsed, and as he worked he turned to me and said “I’m Guy.” It took me a moment, for some reason, to understand that he was introducing himself to me, but I got it together and introduced myself back. He asked what I did, and we talked briefly about doing therapy with young soldiers recently returned from Iraq. Turns out that he has a MS degree in counseling but has been doing jewelry for years. We chatted a little longer, he finished my friend’s necklace, I bought some earrings and we left. My friend pointed out that he seemed really interested in me, which I had not really understood in the moment. It just seems so improbable. The second instance involved a man I run into professionally now and again, as we seem to end up at some events together. The last time we met I didn’t have a business card to give him, which he remembered this week when I saw him. He said “Yeah, last time I gave you a card, and then I went back to my office and checked my email over and over, thinking Why isn’t she emailing me??” Again, in retrospect, it seems flirtatious, but in the moment there’s something in me that just doesn’t read it right.

So what gives? My lack of self esteem regarding matters of my appearance isn’t something I think about much or care to dwell on, because it feels unchangeable. I just can’t believe that someone would look at me and find me attractive. I can believe that someone could fall in love with my personality and come to find me attractive, but to be attracted just to my physical self? I just can’t picture it.

When I’m working with someone who has a belief that seems ironclad, I always have to wonder about the function of that belief. So what’s the function of my continuing to believe that I’m fugly? It’s about safety. It’s not like I have some horrible history of abuse at the hands of my father or other men in my life, but nor have I ever felt especially able to be vulnerable. Closeness feels really, really risky. And it sounds like such a cliché, but my father was always (and continues to be, even though I’m now over 40, for God’s sake) really critical of my physical self. Seems like it’s hard to detach myself from that mirror, or to trust that to open myself up to someone else will not leave me feeling criticized and humiliated.

So, how dumb, right? I meet up with men who make it fairly clear that they think my physical self is more than acceptable, and it still freaks me out. It’s as if I think they must not be able to really see me, but if they got to know me they would peer closer, and all my flaws would suddenly become apparent. And so, here I am once again. It’s not the physical at all, but the more global fear of being known.

Sigh. I was visiting with a friend earlier this evening, a woman who’s also a psychologist and who is currently coping with some significant depression. She said “I feel like a mental patient.” I said “We’re all mental patients.” And I think we are, in one way or another.

Feeding the Hunger

2007-10-23T23:47:00.000-05:00

First the good news. After my Pilates class yesterday, I couldn’t tell what muscles I’d used, as I felt like I had spent an hour rolling around on the floor like a hooked fish. But today I can tell. My abdominals are pleasantly sore, as are the insides of my thighs and the muscles in my butt and lower back. This is good news to me, as I often feel like I’m not doing the exercises right and I’m using all kinds of compensatory muscles since my abs are so weak. So it's cool to have evidence that I'm actually using the right muscles after all.

As I have alluded to in past posts, though, I’m really pretty out of control with eating again. This is starting to feel really crappy. Yes, I seem to be losing some inches because of the exercise, but I’m eating unhealthily, and it feels nasty. I know that when I limit my carbs I have more energy, I don’t fade in the middle of the afternoon, and I sleep better. I also just feel more in control, which inspires more global feelings of well-being and self worth. I haven’t been bingeing lately, exactly…I’ve just been making consistently poor choices for meals, snacking a lot, eating huge portions, etc.

So what’s the deal? It’s weird to me that I’ve managed to start working exercise into my life, which has been a HUGE stumbling block of mine for the longest time, but I can’t seem to manage that and healthy eating at the same time. I think a bit of the problem is a logistical thing: The exercise takes a lot of time, and the cooking and eating well takes a fair bit of time, and I haven’t worked out a schedule for myself that allows me to do both. On the nights I’m at the gym I don’t get home until after 8, and my tendency has been to do the fast food thing as I drive between work and the gym (I know. How gross is that? A Quarter Pounder on the way to work out). Sometimes I’ve managed the foresight to pack some extra string cheese or something in with my lunch, and that gets me through the workout. What I need is to plan to cook on the weekends so that lunch and a late-afternoon pre-workout snack is an easy thing to grab.

But. As usual, the real issue doesn’t have anything to do with making time to cook. It’s a psychological thing. It’s about feeling pouty and put-upon and just not wanting to have to restrain myself in any way. It’s about wanting to be accepted the way I am. It’s about wanting to stick it to my father, who has, for nearly 40 years now, been waiting to see me lose the weight (there were a few years there at the beginning where he thought the chubby baby thing was cute).

And you know what else? There’s this one bit of unfinished business between me and my ex-boyfriend, with whom I broke up a year and a half ago. I’m a signer on a bank account of his, and I’ve never taken the initiative to email him and say “Hey—you probably need to find someone else to do this for you.” I’m assuming that this will involve meeting him at the bank, and I caught myself thinking the other day that I ought to wait until I lose some weight, so that I look really good when I have to see him. So. Avoidant soul that I can be, I’ve set it up so that as long as I’m fat, I don’t need to address this issue. I don’t have to endure the anxiety of sending an email, of calling the bank to figure out what, in fact, needs to happen, of perhaps having to see him, after all this time… And the big bonus is that I get to keep eating!

Sigh. Whether or not I choose to face the ex-boyfriend bank account issue at this particular point in time, I think it’s time to start working toward healthier eating again.

Pilates Sucks Ass

2007-10-22T21:18:00.000-05:00

Pilates class number two this evening. Last week was beginner’s luck, or the honeymoon, or the calm before the storm, or some other metaphor that would capture just how incredibly, suckingly sucky class was tonight. I felt like a giant, fat flailing infant, unable to even hold my head up correctly. The instructor didn’t talk to me at all tonight, which made me feel as if she had totally given up on me and was just going to let me roll around back there as long as I appeared to still be breathing. I said something to that effect after class to my friend J, who came with me. She wisely pointed out that I was all embarrassed last week because I got a pointer from the instructor, and this week I was all sad because I didn’t. What do you want? she asked. Good question. What I want is to be 70 lbs thinner and really fit. Failing that, I guess what I want is the courage to keep showing up and sucking, until I suck no longer.

Here’s one bit of goodness, though, to keep me slogging through the suck. I went shopping for grey pants Sunday. In the past, I’ve been about a size 22, but I could get into certain 20’s if they were stretchy or cut right. On Sunday, I tried on about 10 pairs of pants in a bunch of different cuts, fabrics, brands, etc., and I was a size 20 in all of them! And not even a tight size 20, but a comfortable, right-in-the-middle-of-the-range size 20. Woo-hoo! It’s not a lot of change, but I’ve also been eating like crazy (fodder for a future post, I believe), so it’s gotta be the exercise. Exercise, you’re a nasty beeyotch, but I might decide to keep you around.

Pilates Sucks, and Pilates Rocks

2007-10-15T21:50:00.000-05:00

I went to my first Pilates class tonight. It sucked, and it was pretty cool. It feels like it’ll take forever to get the hang of—I could never remember to keep my abs tight, clench my thigh muscles, make my spine long and breathe in and out when you’re supposed to, all at the same time. Oh, and this thing called ‘bucket breathing,’ where you’re supposed to be inhaling into your lower back or something. Huh? At any given time I was probably doing one of those, or maybe two (except I’m pretty sure I was never bucket breathing). Not to mention the fact that my abs are so weak that I’m not sure I even worked them out very much—for me, it’s sort of like trying to exercise your hair. It just doesn’t move.

Sitting her right now I can feel that my thighs are going to be sore, and my lower back, and my ass…but I can’t really feel anything in my abs. I wonder if it’s going to take a few weeks to even get those muscles to the point that I can really work them.

A few things were hard for me:

1. I was the biggest woman in the class by quite a bit. There were clearly women that hadn’t been doing it for long and seemed a little lost and prone to flailing around, but nobody was very large at all. Except for me. I tried to put it out of my head and just focus on being there (and on that whole impossible list of things we were supposed to be doing all at once), but I definitely felt a more than a little self-conscious.

2. I hate being imperfect at things, and I was definitely imperfect at this. I felt like I was going to fall over and hit my head, even when I was lying on my mat. I had to keep reminding myself that it will become more natural over time, and in the meantime I just have to keep trying.

3. I have trouble asking for or accepting help. The instructor came over early in the session and corrected my posture on an exercise, and I felt like a total reject. Then, later on when she was correcting others on things, I began to worry that she had decided I was a total lost cause and she wasn’t even going to try.

Neurotic much?

But I’m going to go back, because I could see how this would result in some great toning, and I’d be really proud of myself if I could get to the point that I could really do the exercises. Unfortunately, I can only make one class a week because of my work schedule, and that seems less than ideal. Oh well…I guess it just means that I’ll be in flailing beginner mode for longer than I’d like. Core strength, here I come!

Great Workout Mysteries of the Universe

2007-10-07T17:44:00.000-05:00

Since I’ve been working out with some regularity, one thing about it has been just baffling to me. At least for me, there are days when I go, and I’m happy enough to be there, and I sweat and work hard and I don’t much mind it, and I feel good when I leave. Then there are days when I work at the same level of intensity, and it’s insanely difficult. I feel miserable every second, and it sucks and it is so hard, and I am pretty sure I’m going to quit any second…and then it’s over and I feel good.

The thing I don’t get is why it’s hard sometimes and not others. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with how energetic or positive I’m feeling, how much sleep I got, how busy my day was, what I've eaten, etc. It doesn’t even seem to have to do with getting into a groove where I’m exercising a lot. Take yesterday, for example. I hadn’t been to the gym in at least a week. It was a busy work week with a lot of evening stuff, and I had my period and felt crappy all week, and I just didn’t get there. So I went to the gym yesterday thinking that it was going to suck and be difficult because I was kind of out of the groove, but I would just suck it up and it’d be fine again soon. So I get there, and it’s crowded, and immediately my iPod freezes, so I don’t even have music. Then the headphone jack on the elliptical machine I chose was broken, so I couldn’t get audio for the TV screen. So, I watched (but couldn’t hear) some show called Good Pets Gone Bad (people who survived animal attacks—everything from housecats to trained bears. Seriously.) and did my 30 mins on the elliptical.

And here’s the part that surprised me—it was the easiest 30 mins I’ve ever done. I wasn’t draggy and cranky and miserable, the time didn’t crawl by and I wasn’t making bargains with Jesus to get me through it. My heart rate didn’t even get up as high as it usually does. Normally I get myself up into the 150s and stay there for the 30 mins, but this time I peaked in the mid 120s. Weird. Did fitness come to call while I was taking a week off? Is this how everyone experiences their own improving fitness?

Prior to now, progress has been more subtle—I turn up the resistance on the machine every couple of weeks and/or add 5 minutes onto my time and/or increase my speed, then it feels hard for a while and then in a week or two I’m ready to increase one of the variable again. This, though, was just a really notable change., and at a time when I was expecting the exact opposite. Interesting.

Readiness

2007-09-23T20:33:00.000-05:00

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is readiness. I look back on successful attempts to change anything in my life, and it seems as if there’s some hard-to-define but important attitude shift that makes it possible to at least get started and endure the preliminary discomfort of making sacrifices and adopting new habits. And there are so many more unsuccessful attempts, where that attitude shift wasn’t there, and I spun my wheels for a while and then just gave up.

Take now, for example. I’ve been pretty focused lately on getting myself to the gym as many nights a week as I can. Something in me just clicked and allowed me to march myself into the gym, pay the signup fee, buy the clothes and the bag and the water bottle and the iPod and risk looking like a big, chubby, uncoordinated dimwit 3-5 nights a week as I attempt to work out. Something has made that possible.

And, just as interestingly, right now I seem to lack the indefinable something that I would need in order to get my eating into a principled and controlled place. I haven’t been at all careful about what I eat, and while it’s certainly not as bad as it’s been at times in the past, I’m aware of eating less well and healthily than would be ideal.

So what is it? I think after a time it becomes momentum, where the changes take on their own weight, and the change barrels down the hill on its own. At least for me that seems to be the case—whether it’s weight loss or exercise or some other life-change, I can feel the different behaviors become habits after a time. But what about the very earliest stages of change, where you not only decide you want something to be different, but you actually act on that desire and see it through until the momentum can take over? That’s the part that feels like kind of a mystery to me.

In my Great Weight Loss Experience of 2000, I remember approaching the whole thing like a time-limited experiment. I chose to use the Atkins approach, and I remember thinking that I’d give it a couple of weeks, eat according to their crazy plan and see what happened in my body. And then I could stop if I felt like it. Two things happenend: 1. I lost 12 lbs. 2. I felt good. At that point, both of those things gave me the motivation that I needed to continue. But I don’t for the life of me remember what gave me the gumption, the courage, the motivation, the whatever, to make all those changes before I knew what was going to happen.

So what’s the difference between then and now? I could embrace a particular kind of eating back then, but now I just can’t be bothered. And yet I seem able to make another kind of change in my life by exercising regularly. I’d hate to think that I have some finite amount of change-readiness in my psyche, and I can only take on one thing at a time. Or, worse yet, that I am only able to choose one healthy lifestyle behavior at a time. All I know is that there’s some kind of a click, and sometimes I get there and sometimes I don’t.

Oh, and I weighed myself this morning, and my digital scale told me I weighed 4 lbs. Either it’s time to buy a new scale, or this gym thing is REALLY working for me.

Helloooooooo!

2007-09-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

So, I’m back. I’m not sure what this extended absence was about, exactly…other than just feeling distracted and focused on other things in my life. It’s funny, though—while I didn’t feel like keeping up with my own blog, I was still motivated to keep up with all of you whose blogs I read regularly. I continued to stop by and read what was going on for you, though I didn’t comment much. I guess I needed a little vacation from writing.

I missed you all while I wasn’t writing. It makes me realize that I have a nice little group of friends here in the world of self-improvement blogging, and that my own active involvement helps me stay connected to people I’ve really come to like and feel close to (you all know who you are *smile and wave*).

So what have I been up to? Getting used to my new job, mostly. I’m very lucky to be working exactly where I wanted to be, though the position itself is not what I would’ve designed for myself. It makes me realized that I had gotten very comfortable with the types of people I used to see for psychotherapy, and those folks exercised skills in me that were already strong. This new group? Wow. It’s a whole different ballgame, and I’m working muscles that haven’t gotten much of a workout before. These are younger guys, mostly, and all newly returned from combat in Iraq. They’re not sure that they want therapy, or what it might do for them, and they’re still pretty sure they’re going to be able to cope on their own. Yet many of them are pretty miserable, and things in their lives aren’t going well. The guys I used to work with, in the residential rehab facility? They were pretty sure that they weren’t managing on their own all that well, and they were mostly willing to accept help. So, it’s new, and it’s weird, and it’s got me in that place of discomfort we all feel before we start to grow and stretch and ultimately become better at what we do.

I see that I’ve been using lots of physical metaphors here. That makes sense, I guess, because the other new horizon I’ve continued to explore has been getting fit. I think one of my last entries here was about joining a gym, and much to my own surprise, I’ve continued to go on a pretty regular basis. I’ve been managing to get there 3-4 times per week, and I’m starting to miss it on days that I don’t go. I’ve gotten into a routine that makes me puff and sweat some but is also kind of meditative somehow, and I like it. I’ve been using this elliptical-like machine, and I’ve been increasing both resistance and length of time I’m on it…I’m so ridiculously out of shape in terms of cardiopulmonary stamina that it’s taken me a while to be able to work hard enough to make my muscles burn, but I’m finally getting there. I do a half hour on the elliptical, and then I go walk a mile on the treadmill to cool down, which usually takes me about 20 mins. I’m still way, way too shy to hire a personal trainer; one of them just sort of randomly made eye contact with me yesterday, and I about ran and hid. Well, one day…when I’m feeling braver. I need some help with beginning a weight training program, so when I’m ready for that I’ll have to hire an expert.

Interestingly, in all of this, my eating has become completely out of my control once again. I’ve hardly tried to rein it in, but it’s getting to be time. I’ve got a comforting little exercise routine, and while my job continues to be stressful, eating everything that I can get my hands on doesn’t actually help. You’d think, after all these years, I would not have to prove that to myself again and again. But some lessons seem to take a while to sink in.

So, there you have it. Thank you all for allowing me to stay connected to your lives, and welcome back to mine.

Checking in and Catching up

2007-08-13T20:39:00.001-05:00

OK, I totally forgot to weigh in on Sunday or today. I think I’ll just scratch it for the week and get back on schedule next Sunday.

Last week, though, was a good week for New Body Experiences. I went to the gym twice to work out, which makes me feel like a rock star, if a rotund and easily winded one. The first time I used the elliptical machine for 27 minutes and the second time I lasted for an even 30. I have a ton of questions about things, like how to cool down afterward, what kind of stretches are good, etc. So I think it’s time to use my complimentary personal trainer sessions, which perhaps I’ll do in the coming week. Here’s the weird thing for me about this whole experience: while I’m actually exercising, I HATE it. I feel icky and clumsy and puffy. But afterward I kind of look forward to going again. Crazy! Some of it is just the novelty of the experience, the fact that the gym I chose is kind of swanky, etc. But I’m hoping to get to a point where I actually crave the exercise itself and miss it when I don’t do it. I’ve been at that point at other times in my life, and it’s great. Well, we’ll see.

The other thing I got to do was try Tai Chi. In my new job, I’ll be co-facilitating a relaxation group for vets recently back from Iraq, and my co-facilitator is a nurse who does a lot of meditation and martial arts. I sat in on one of his groups last week, and he was teaching Tai Chi. It was interesting and made me think that I might like to take a class in it. I’m finding that it’s kind of fun to experiment with moving my body in different ways, even if those ways feel odd and ungainly.

And in other, non-body related news, I am finishing up my post-doc this week, with many sad goodbyes, even though I’ll just be in another part of the hospital. I had my final Monday night dinner at the halfway house tonight, and they bought me a card and fixed lasagna in honor of my ethnicity. Cute, and kinda sad. I’ll miss those guys. I said goodbye this morning to a patient I’ve worked with for about a year now. She’s a 75 year old lady that has been processing some very difficult stuff from early in her life, and it’s been an intense working relationship. She said this morning that our parting was “like losing a little sister,” which just broke my heart. This is the hardest part of what I do. Even when there’s great satisfaction in what you’ve helped someone accomplish, the ending can be so, so hard. It’s going to be an emotional week, and a food-laden week, too. I just don’t feel like watching myself and worrying about what I consume, and I’m not sure I’d have the resources for it if I did. I’m just going to be in the moment and see what comes this week. After that…we’ll just have to see.

Luna Joins Up

2007-08-07T21:23:00.000-05:00

Woo-hoo! Get ready to be proud of me…I joined a gym tonight. I agreed to go with my friend who is already a member, just so I could check it out a little bit. She assured me that it’s a friendly, low-key place, with lots of awkward and un-fit people of all ages and sizes, and that I’d feel perfectly comfortable. I was skeptical.

But you know, she was right. The membership woman who showed us around was young and friendly, and she had hips and thighs big enough to make me feel sort of happy and un-judged. My friend went and got down to business on an elliptical machine, and I just decided to get over myself and join. My fee includes most classes, including pilates and water aerobics (Thanks, *S*!), which are two classes I’m particularly interested in. It also includes three sessions with a personal trainer, which I definitely plan to use. But for tonight, I got signed up, got my complimentary newbie bottle of water and went over to join my friend on the elliptical next to hers. I didn’t know how to set it, so I just hit the ‘fat burning’ button and keyed in my age, and it told me my target heart rate and then kept track of it for me while I was using the machine. Each machine has its own little TV screen, complete with cable TV, but I quickly found out that I do better with music than TV. So I got to trudging away, and I’m surprised to say that I was able to do 27 minutes on it! Now, I at many points had to go so slowly that I got a message saying “workout paused,” but whatever. It’s a start, and yay me for taking my supa-brave self out for something new and different.

I was a little intimidated by the personal trainers I saw wandering around, particularly the guys. Some of them were huge and muscular and scary looking, but they have a couple of women as well. So, when I book my three sessions, I’ll have to ask for someone that does not look like an Olympian.

I find myself surprised that I’m a little excited and optimistic about this. It feels like a nice way to start reclaiming my life and my body after the multi-year avalanche of poor health-habits that was graduate school. I spent a long time getting my brain all fit, and now it’s time to work on the stuff from the ears down. I just have to remember to be patient with myself when it takes just as long.

Fitness Comes a-Callin'

2007-08-06T21:32:00.000-05:00

The world is telling me it’s time to stop avoiding exercise.

First, there’s my new job, which comes complete with a fitness-fanatic partner named Andy. Andy’s a nurse and Army vet, and he’s very much into yoga, meditation, hiking, etc. He’s also a devoted stair-climber. My office, which I will be sharing with Active Andy, is on the 8^th floor. Andy has promised me that he will turn me into a stair climber yet…and I told him that I would give it my best shot. Now, you may remember that one of my mini-goals was to start taking the stairs at work, and I’m kinda proud to say that I’ve been doing that. However, I never have to go higher than the 3^rd floor, so it’s not really that big an accomplishment. But I do it. I have to admit, the thought of climbing to the 8^th floor has me most intimidated, but I’m thinking that maybe Andy will help me come up with some kind of training program. Seriously, if I try to climb to the 8^th floor now, my heart will burst and I’ll keel over dead on a landing somewhere between 3 and 5.

The second thing is my very good friend J, whose life has been full of stress in the last several months. I got an email from her this weekend (I was out of town—normally we just talk on the phone or in person), and she said that she’d been sitting on her couch all weekend, eating cookies and watching movies, and she felt crappy. She said that it was time for a change, and she invited me to join a gym with her. J has been a fit and active person in the past, but she broke her wrist badly late this winter, and it has not been healing well, despite surgery and lots of PT. She loves biking, but her wrist can no longer support her weight on a bike, so she hasn’t been doing much exercise at all. This injury, coupled with a lot of work stress, has gotten her to a point of feeling pretty depressed. Her invitation to work out together is great for me: I get to feel like I’m supporting her, and she gets to support me in my goal of learning to exercise too.

And that’s what it feels like: learning to exercise. I have always felt like the biggest, lamest loser when it comes to anything that involves moving my body around. I feel clumsy, sweaty, wheezy…just icky in every way. I’ve never learned to experience fatigue as a good thing; to me, it just reminds me that I’m fat, I’m asthmatic and I’m unfit. The asthma has definitely been a big influence here. I’ve had it since I was three, and it’s induced by allergies as well as by exercise. So all throughout my childhood, when I would run or bike or otherwise exert myself, I would have an asthma attack. We had to run every day in gym class, and I never seemed to get any fitter, though I’d run like the other kids did (though slower). Over time, I began to believe that I just couldn’t do it, especially when I didn’t perceive any improvement, and exercise made me feel sick.

So now I need to remind myself that it’s OK to huff and puff. Breathing hard is not the same as having an asthma attack. It’s OK to get sweaty and tired, because that means I’m doing something good for myself. Feeling weak and clumsy is OK, because everyone has to start somewhere, and this is where I’m starting.

Wish me luck!

(Oh, and I know…I didn’t weigh in this week. I was out of town visiting with family, and I didn’t get back until late Sunday night. I ate like a big, hungry pig all weekend, so I doubt the news is good, anyway. Next week, though. Promise.)

Weekly Weigh-In, and More Cuteness Concerns

2007-07-29T17:32:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 230.5
Change this week: -1.5
Total change: -9.5

So I’m talking this week to the guy who is vacating the job that I’ll be taking in a few weeks. This job, which I don’t think I’ve described in any detail thus far, involves doing outreach for and therapy with soldiers who have recently returned from the war in Iraq. Quite a bit of it will involve representing my organization to them and trying to get them to come in for treatment when they need it.

Anyway, this guy—the one currently holding my new job. As we talk, he’s going on and on about having to meet with congresspeople and the media and stuff in the course of doing this job, and I get a sudden, big pit in my stomach about how visible I’m going to have to be. How polished I’ll have to be, how articulate, how in-the-know…all things that will come with time, I know, once I’ve gotten myself familiar with the drill. But of course, the biggest worry for me is the appearance thing. It’s silly. I know it’s silly. It’s not like anyone’s going to walk out of a meeting with me, thinking “Well, gosh. That big ol’ gal sure knew her stuff, but it’s a pity that she’s just so darn BIG.” So I do some talking to myself and (sort of) get a handle on the anxiety. Then, the next day, one of my new supervisors calls and asks me to make an appointment to get some headshots made for the posters that are going to go up around the hospital of the team that I’m on.

Headshots, people.

For posters that are GOING UP AROUND THE HOSPITAL.

Shit. This feels like some kind of high school anxiety dream.

OK, at least this is a poster that will have a bunch of folks on it, so my mug is not the only one that you’ll see. Nobody will be zeroing in on my cheery, chubby smiling face. I get that. But this is such an adjustment to make in terms of how public or private my day-to-day life is going to be. One of the things I’ve always liked about doing psychotherapy for a living is that it’s pretty private. You generally sit in your office all day and talk to people one-on-one. Plenty of therapists do group therapy or give educational presentations, and I have done both of those things from time to time and like them just fine.

It’s just that I’ve never felt this much pressure to be presentable before. I don’t know what to wear for my picture, and I’m afraid it’ll be like getting a drivers’ license, where you look like you’re suffering from a nasty case of untreated malaria, and then when you went to get help the doctors beat you up. And that’s what you have to live with for the next ten years every time you open your wallet.

I mean, I’m sure if I call the folks who do the picture-taking, they’ll have some suggestions about what to wear and what colors look good, etc. They can’t help me lose 100 lbs and get plastic surgery and somehow have fabulous hair in time for my sitting, though, and that’s what I find myself dreaming of. This writing about it, though…this is helping. I sound so nutty, even to myself, that I seem to be magically gaining a little perspective as I type.

I’m just anxious about this change in my life, and about going from being a trainee to being someone who is expected to have her shit together. There’s such comfort in being able to plead ignorance or inexperience, which is always an out for you when you’re a trainee. The thing is that I never used that out. I don’t need it, and I know that. But it’s much more fun to be the intern or the post-doc who’s so advanced for her training, and gosh isn’t she talented, than the staff psychologist who is simply expected not to make a fool of herself or the institution she represents.

Here is Adult Luna speaking: I know it’ll be OK. I am so thankful for this job, and for the chance to stretch myself by learning to do something new and different. The anxiety is appropriate to the newness of the experience, and it signals the opportunity for growth and development.

Here’s Perpetual Adolescent Luna, who also wants her turn to speak: Holy shit. I’m scared. I want to be left alone, I want to just keep doing what I know how to do. These people will hate me. What people? I don’t even know, but I’m sure that they’re going to think I’m a total dumbass with rumply hair and no fashion sense.

I think for the next few months, it’s going to be anybody’s guess who’s in charge at any given time.

And while they duke it out inside my head, if anyone has any advice about how not to be crushingly, tragically fugly for the camera when I go to get my pic snapped, I’d be more than happy to hear it.

Weekly Weigh-In, and Cuteness Concerns

2007-07-22T16:50:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 232
Change this week: -1
Total change: -8

Whoo-hoo! I lost a pound despite having eaten out all week and not watched my intake at all. I ate loads (crabcakes, anyone?—when you’re on the East Coast, how can you not?), but I also walked all over the place. It was crazy hot, and humid enough that I think I was a bit dehydrated the whole time I was there. The walking made me super-crabby, but I can’t complain, as I came back slightly less lardy than I went.

The conference was interesting, I guess…I work for a governmental agency, and this was the first national mental health conference I’d ever been to. Lots of talking about big new programs and things getting rolled out across the country, but it all just seemed so heavy on words and light on action.

There were a few people from my particular hospital there, but I traveled and stayed with a friend and fellow post-doc. We were together the whole time, and we did lots of exploring and shopping during our off hours. She is much younger than I am, and tiny, and GORGEOUS. We wandered in to one little boutique during our wandering, and she tried on a dress that was just impossibly lovely. She glowed like the moon in it—it set off her hair, her big blue-green eyes and her skin tone in a way that was just amazing. I was so, so jealous. She was debating about buying it, and I told her that if I looked that good in anything, I’d pay whatever it cost to have it. And I wasn’t kidding.

I thought a lot about appearance this week. Being in a room with 600 mental health people, you realize that we’re not generally the most gorgeous group of folks around. I was remembering feeling nervous about starting graduate school, and I had nerves about everything from not being smart enough to not being cute enough. I confessed this last fear to my then-therapist, who started to laugh and said “Have you ever been in a room full of psychologists??” So, yeah, the bar is not that high.

But something about my new job is making me feel like I have to get it together a little, appearance-wise. My organization is generally not especially formal, but the psychologists do dress up a little more than others. I’m having that old feeling of not being polished enough, or cute enough…and I so wish that I could find an outfit that makes me jaw-droppingly, glowingly gorgeous like my friend did. I wish to just be that gorgeous, outfit or no.

I mean, realistically, I’m OK. I do a fine job at work, and my size/appearance is no barrier to doing the work that I do. I’m aware of this. I’m just wistful, I guess, about wanting to be the pretty girl I really never have been. Having a new job, and one that’s a little higher-profile than your average therapist gig, heightens those feelings for me.

While I'm thinking about it, let me say thank you to you guys who left sweet messages of congratulations for me. I'm so happy about landing a job that allows me to stay where I am, and I was excited to let you all know. Thanks for sharing it with me!

Weekly Weigh-In, and The 11th Hour Job Offer

2007-07-16T23:15:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 233
Change this week: -1
Total change: -7

This will be a quickie, as I’m trying to get myself packed to go to a conference for the rest of the week. So, I lost a pound, which is probably due to some combination of my period being over and having done my pilates video a few times this week.

Oh, and here’s some Really Good News: I got hired permanently today! It’s a great position at the hospital where I currently work and where my postdoc is getting ready to end. I could not be happier. The process was unbelievably fast, particularly for this institution, where progress is usually glacial. I was summoned to our mental health director’s office today, interviewed with him at 1pm, with another manager at 4pm and had an offer by 4:30. This was all for a position that I didn’t even know was available until last Friday. Unbelievable. I feel so, so relieved.

Well, I’ll post more over the weekend. For anyone who’s emailed me in the last week or so, I apologize for the delay in responding…I’m up to my ears in stuff.

Happy week, all!

Rainy Days and Mondays

2007-07-09T20:07:00.000-05:00

What a wonderful day it turned out to be. I had a visit from a long-ago client, who popped in for a tune-up and some comfort. He was one of my all-time favorite clients, a sweet, sweet man who nearly wrecked his life with his addiction but who decided at the ripe old age of 50 to put down the heroin and crack and pick up his life again. He has done so very well, and he is now facing some terrible pain and loss in his life, but he’s handling it. I sat with him today and watched him cry, watched the tears run down his face and drip off his chin, and I ached for him and for my inability to do much for him. But I also felt so inspired by his strength and by the fact that he is facing some of the worst emotional pain a person can feel, and he’s living through it.

And then, Monday evening is the night I have dinner at the halfway house. Residents usually take turns cooking for the whole group, but today it was the staff’s turn to make dinner. The case manager and I decided to take the guys out for a surprise picnic, despite the fact that it rained most of the afternoon. We got all the stuff, stowed it in the vans we checked out and then showed up at the house as if we had forgotten it was our turn to cook and we were just expecting to be fed, like any other Monday night. Then we hustled them all into the vans and down to the lakefront for a picnic and walk by the lake. Fun! These are men who have mostly been alcoholics or drug addicts for their adult lives, and they don’t always have the best social skills, having spent most of their time drunk or high. It’s wonderful to watch them come out of their shells and start figuring that it can be fun to socialize.

I do so love my job. And as I wrote about here a few weeks ago, there continues to be a bit of uncertainty as to where I’ll be come the end of my postdoctoral year. It seems most likely that I’ll end up at a clinic a couple of hours north of here, which will necessitate a move away from my beloved current worksite, my friends, etc. I remain grateful for good days like today, but it makes saying goodbye all the harder.

Weekly Weigh-In, and New Body Experiences

2007-07-08T17:58:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 234
Change this week: +0
Total change: -6

Another week of no change. As I’ve said before, I’m more than satisfied with this, as I’ve not been trying at all to control my eating. The thing that is saving me from weight gain, I think, is that most of the big eating I’ve been doing has been fresh berries lately, and it’s hard to get yourself in too much trouble with fruit.

I had my first-ever massage today. I’ve always felt weird about getting one for all the predictable reasons—the massage therapist is going to be repelled by my tubby body, I don’t deserve one because I’m not physically active, I’ll be embarrassed to be seen naked, the table won’t be strong enough to hold me, etc. etc. etc. But I’ve been thinking about all the ways that I’ve neglected my body over the years and all the ways that I can work to repair that relationship now. Eating better and losing weight is certainly part of that goal—goodness knows I’ve treated myself badly by not eating right. But I’ve also treated myself badly by ignoring my body and withholding things that it would like or that would make it look pretty. In the last few years I’ve started to turn that around in small ways, by getting pedicures now and again, or getting my eyebrows waxed. Lord, I remember that first pedicure—I felt unbelievably uncomfortable, as if the person doing my feet and all the other people in the salon were thinking “Who’s the fat slob over there who thinks she’s fancy enough to be getting a pedicure??” And I didn’t start having my eyebrows groomed until I’d lost quite a bit of weight.

The truth is, as long as I was fat I was convinced that nobody would even notice if my toenails were painted or my eyebrows were shapely. I was convinced that people would look at me, trying to be pretty, and they’d shake their heads and laugh at what a losing battle I was fighting. It took losing a bunch of weight during the Great Flab-Blasting Adventure of 2000-2001 to help me take a risk and start experimenting with these kinds of things. And I’ve pretty much kept them up, even as my weight has climbed back up.

But a massage. Wow. Me, naked, with someone kneading and touching and rubbing All That Flesh. I still don’t know if I would’ve ever done it, except for that my most excellent friends pooled their money and got me a massage gift certificate for my birthday last month. And gang, let me tell you, it was lovely. I did have to do some cognitive work with myself before I went this morning, telling myself that they see all kinds of bodies, and any massage therapist worth her salt would be happy to see me doing something healthy for myself, whether I’m a size 6 or 26. I reminded myself what it’s like for me to sit down with someone whose mind has kind of gotten out of whack, and that there’s very little someone can tell me that would make me feel judgmental.

So I did it. I went in, checked in and met my massage therapist, Katy. I went into the little room with her and thought “Wow. That’s not much of a table. What if it’s not sturdy?” But it was. She left me and I got undressed and slipped under the sheet. Then she came back and dimmed the lights so low that I could hardly see her…which meant that she could hardly see me. So far, so good. The massage itself was wonderful. I challenged myself to focus entirely on the physical sensations and to let all of the cognitive stuff just melt away. Mostly, I could do that. There were times when I became aware of what felt like a lot of fat sliding around on me, but I then just returned my focus to the physical and quit worrying about it.

This experience has me thinking about the many things that make up our relationship with our bodies, and the many ways that those relationships can change. I am currently not in such a great place to control my eating, and so I’m not losing weight. I would like to change that, and eventually I will. But I also resolve to be mindful of the other ways that I can stop ignoring my body. This massage is one of those ways, and it was nice enough that I’ll try to make it a semi-regular habit.

Goals for the week:
The old regulars:

Take the stairs at work
Bring my lunch

A new one:

Have a new body experience. I bought a Pilates DVD some time ago, and it’s time to give it a try.

Have a good week, all!

Weekly Weigh-In

2007-07-01T16:38:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 234
Change this week: +2
Total change: -6

Sigh. Well, I’d love to tell myself that my two pound gain this week is attributable to the fact that my period is due soon, but I think it’s more likely due to the completely uncontrolled way I’ve been eating. Oh, and the not exercising. That too.

The small bit of good news is that I continue to be able to keep my weekly resolutions about taking my lunch to work and taking the stairs. This feels like it means relatively little in the grand scheme of things, but it’s something.

It’s been a very pretty weekend here, and I’ve spent quite a bit of it outside. I was in a crowd of people at an outdoor music event on Friday night, and I found myself looking around to see if I was the biggest one in the immediate vicinity. Here’s the weird thing: I often do that—check around to see if I stand out as the largest one around—but I am pretty much unable to compare myself to others with any accuracy. I mean, I am aware of certain facts about myself: I have brown, wavy hair, brown eyes and pale skin, I am 5’8” tall, I wear size 18-20 tops and 20-22 pants, size 10 shoes…I have the numbers down. But if you lined up 10 overweight women, I’d have no idea who was closest to me in size, whose body shape was similar to mine, etc. It’s a strange deficit.

I think the hope and fear tension I wrote about yesterday is in play here as well. I am so afraid that the first impression I give people is “Fat Girl,” and that my fat is the most immediately remarkable thing about my appearance. But I simultaneously hold out hope that the whole situation is really somehow much less dire than I fear it is…that I’m going to suddenly realize one day that I’m being much too hard on myself, and really I’m just a wee bit above average in size. I think I’m held hostage in the tension between those two opposites, and the result is that I’m just completely confused about what I really look like.

I found, during my lard-busting adventures of a few years ago, that I got to be a little bit better about actually being able to see myself as I lost weight. I got so that I could appreciate when certain things looked good on me, and that was nice. Even so, though, the easiest way for me to tell that I’d lost weight was by touch. I got so that, laying in bed before a weekly weigh in, I could put my hand on my belly flab and tell whether it had gone down or not. The visual thing has just never worked for me.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I’ve read on many of your blogs about how your internal body-image is a smaller person, and you’re shocked to see pictures or videos that make it obvious what you really look like. I’ve certainly had that experience as well. And yet I’ve had the opposite experience too. I took some digital pics of my body to use as a baseline so I could track my progress visually (in the event that there’s some progress to record…). I looked at them and thought “Really? That’s all?” It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. I mean, not great, but not as tragic as I’d thought.

Confusing. I’d really like to just have a realistic visual representation of my body in my head. I think it would motivate me to stick to this weight-loss adventure, and maybe it would also help me at times when I’m convinced that I’m too fugly to leave the house ever again.

Tales of Woe, Part 1: Fear and Hope

2007-06-30T23:09:00.000-05:00

I posted an entry a few weeks ago about not getting a job that I wanted, which would have allowed me to stay working at the medical center where I currently work when my one-year fellowship ends in mid-August. It’s not a job that I wanted very badly, honestly, but it seemed like a reasonable fit for my interests and skills and it would’ve kept me from having to move. Much to my surprise (and the surprise of many others, if people are being sincere), the job went to a friend of mine instead of to me. The thing that stings is that she had no experience in this particular area of psychology, and I’ve been working nearly exclusively in this area for the last year and a half. Oh, and the person who made the decision to give her the job was my clinical supervisor, who has worked closely with me for the last 10 months or so. In breaking the news to me, he told me that my not getting the job is in no way a comment on my skills, or my value to the institution, or blah blah blah…a laundry list of things that just felt condescending, insincere and as if they were meant to keep me from bursting into tears just long enough for my supervisor to get out of my office. He also promised me that he and the rest of the administration were working oh so hard to find me a position, and that they really, really wanted to keep me working for them (not enough to award me the position that was open, apparently, but I didn’t point that out). And to be fair, I have been offered a position in the system, at a small satellite clinic in a town about two hours north of here. It’s a job, and probably not a bad one.

So, in the intervening two weeks since the decision was made, all anybody at work wants to talk to me about is this situation. Some folks want to cuss out the people responsible for the decision, which makes me feel kinda good (my favorite was a co-worker who just looked at me, shook his head and said “There are some ignorant sons-of-bitches in management around here.” I wanted to hug him). Then there are the folks who are driving me nuts, the ones who so want me to believe that there’s something right around the corner for me, and I’m just a big ol’ pessimist if I can’t see that for myself. One of these people is my friend who got the job. Her having gotten the job is not putting nearly so much of a strain on our friendship as is her nearly-delusional insistence that there WILL be a job for me, and it’ll be coming through any day now, and I’m just being irrational to not hold out the cheeriest of super-cheery hope. It’s all she wants to talk about, and it kind of makes me want to strangle her.

I don’t dare hope, at this point. To continue to hold out hope is an invitation to further and bigger disappointment. Except that I can’t seem to help it, on some level. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to leave my friends, and this city I’ve come to know and like. I don’t want to leave the hospital I work in now, with the good staff, the interesting clientele and the many growth/advancement opportunities. But it hardly seems reasonable, with the days ticking away until the end of the fellowship year.

So I’m stuck between the desire to hope and the fear of getting those hopes squashed like a grape. And I’m stressed. I always tell myself that I’m doing OK, that I do have employment waiting for me, and it probably won’t be that long before I’m back down in the city amongst my friends, right where I want to be. But one thing I know about myself is that I don’t do that well with uncertainty, and the unresolved-ness of all this is making me edgy and unhappy. I’m trying hard to cling to order wherever I can find it (keeping the house neat, having healthy and tasty food available, doing laundry, etc), but I’m just not doing that great a job. And predictably, the thing that’s fallen by the wayside in the biggest way is my eating habits. But I’m here, and as promised, I’m writing about the stuff that’s giving me fits. One way or another, it’ll settle down, and I will too. In the meantime, the writing helps. I feel calmer.

Weekly Weigh-In (aka You Get What You Need)

2007-06-24T22:17:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 232
Change this week: 0
Total change: -8

Holding steady for the third straight week. While I seem to be able to set small goals for myself and stick to them (climbing stairs all week? Yup. taking my lunch to work? Check.) I’m just not able to get myself together to control my eating habits to the degree that I can actually start counting down the pounds again.

So, I feel a little at a loss to know what to write here. I mean, this is supposed to be a weight-loss blog, yes? And there’s not a lot of that going on for me right now. I just feel consumed by what’s going on in other areas of my life, and I don’t seem to be able to pull it together to make good food choices on a daily basis.

Maybe I just need to be writing about those other areas. The thing is, I feel like anyone who reads this blog comes here to read about me battling my pudge, not about me whining about my work situation, my friends with difficult lives, etc.

And yet. I know that when I read your blogs, I really appreciate hearing about your lives. It makes me feel more connected to you all and to your struggles, and it’s good to know that those struggles affect your relationships to your bodies, just as they do for me. So maybe I need to get over the feeling that I’m not going to be giving you what you came here for. In fact, the issue is really that this wasn’t what I had in mind when I started this blog. I pictured myself reading regularly, posting regularly, regularly recording small losses in weight that added up over time to something I could be proud of. And this hasn’t been that.

A client said to me Friday that he wasn’t sure he was getting what he came for, but he was getting what he didn’t know he really needed. That’s the case here, too, I think. I wanted to be some kind of super-weight-loss-success-story, with a blog that people would read to gain insight and inspiration for their own struggles. But what I needed? That’s different. I think I need to be honest, to feel connected to other folks who are battling the weight and trying to forge better relationships with their bodies as they also cope with all the crap that gets thrown at you along the way. As I’ve been writing about lately, I need to give myself permission to be upset and vulnerable, and to be able to do that in the real world as well. This is an area in which I’ve made some progress, I think. I’m aware of how weird it feels to be quiet, or thoughtful, or grouchy or sad around others and not try to cover it up. The cool thing about it is that as I’ve given myself permission to be less-than-bulletproof, I’ve started to feel a little better. So, some of the weight around my psyche is coming off…maybe the weight around the rest of me will follow suit.

Tag! I'm it

2007-06-22T22:31:00.000-05:00

Erin, over at Minx, Redux tagged me with the following meme. Thanks, Erin! Not much to say, diet-wise, but I'll post a weigh-in on Sunday and comment on the week then. In the meantime, here are some answers to some questions. If you want to play along, please do!

WHAT WERE YOU DOING TEN YEARS AGO?

Ten years ago I was 31. I was living in Chicago and working as an administrative support person for the Women’s Studies Program at Northwestern U. It was, in some ways, the best job I will ever have; the pay was crap, but it was easy, fun work with wonderful colleagues who became wonderful friends as well. I was also taking courses in preparation for entering grad school in clinical psychology. That was a fun time in my life.

WHAT WERE YOU DOING A YEAR AGO?

This time last year I had just turned 40. My friends threw a great party for me, my brother surprised me by showing up unannounced, and I generally felt like a big princess. At the same time, I was finishing up my internship and getting ready to defend my dissertation, so there was a lot of stress in my life. I was also grieving the end of a long-term relationship and realizing how very sad and wrong it felt to negotiate these life milestones without this man beside me.

FIVE SNACKS YOU ENJOY
1. Pistachios
2. String cheese
3. Blueberries
4. Anything with coconut in it
5. Olives

FIVE SONGS TO WHICH YOU KNOW ALL THE LYRICS
1. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
2. Love Roller Coaster
3. Dirty Work (Steely Dan)
4. Bohemian Rhapsody
5. The Hokey-Pokey

FIVE THINGS YOU WOULD DO IF YOU WERE A MILLIONAIRE
1. Buy an old house and rehab it with lots of eco-friendly materials
2. Donate money to my brother’s organization to support his wildlife research
3. Donate money to the sexual-assault prevention network I volunteered for in grad school
4. Buy my other brother a better car
5. Take a cool vacation

FIVE BAD HABITS
1. Emotional eating
2. Procrastination
3. Nail biting (actually, cuticle biting—the nails I leave alone)
4. Picking my toenails (I know…totally disgusting. I only do it when I’m alone. Like that helps.)
5. Letting my Netflix movies sit for weeks.

FIVE THINGS YOU LIKE DOING
1. Driving
2. Taking a nap
3. Reading
4. Laughing
5. Playing with friends

FIVE THINGS YOU'LL NEVER WEAR AGAIN
I’m old enough that some of these are truly horrible memories…I should include a picture with each.
1. Leggings
2. An afro (from the Tragic Home-Perm archives)
3. Enormous glasses (my glasses from the 80s were the size of sandwich plates)
4. Shimmery eye shadow all the way up to my eyebrows
5. A jumpsuit (In 5^th grade, I had a swinging denim jumpsuit—OK, I hear you laughing, but it was 1976—and in gym class I blew out the crotch trying to do a somersault. Oh, the humiliation).

FIVE FAVORITE TOYS
1. My Prius
2. My laptop
3. My digital camera
4. My Freud Action Figure
5. Google

So...TAG! You're it. If you decide to answer the questions, drop me a comment and let me know, so I can come visit and learn something new about you.

"INSTRUCTIONS: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so."

1. Lose Weight With Me
2. Kathy Calculates
3. The Pursuit of Healthyness
4. Minx, Redux
5. The Journey of a Thousand Miles

"Next select some people to tag:

1. Squilla
2. Meegan
3. Kerri
4. *S*

Weekly Weigh-In

2007-06-17T19:17:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 232
Change this week: 0
Total change: -8

Holding steady feels like a fine thing to me, given that I have not been working at all on the weight-loss endeavor AT ALL. I’ve been grateful for the fact that, despite my less-than-ideal emotional state, I haven’t been tempted to stuff myself for comfort. I’m definitely not making the healthiest choices available to me, but I’m also not coming home with a box of doughnuts and quart of milk every night. That is progress in and of itself.

I have been very socially active lately, which is both good and bad. I’ve been seeking out others as a way to cope with feeling draggy and blue, and that’s definitely helped me out. However, as I’ve written about previously, social events are notoriously difficult for me to handle from a principled-eating perspective. In these last few weeks, though, I’ve thrown the weight-loss thing to the wind in favor of getting my emotional feet under me again, so I’ve really not been thinking at all about the caloric effects of socializing.

It feels like it might be time to start expecting some things from myself again. It also feels like I might be at a place where exerting some control over my eating and re-establishing some small goals will help me feel like I’m moving forward.

So. Small goals. I liked the goal of taking the stairs at work, which I have completely abandoned in the last few weeks. I also want to re-establish the habit of taking my lunch to work, which has fallen by the wayside recently along with the stair-climbing. I feel silly about setting these wee little micro-goals, but I’m aware that I’m the person who let her mail pile up all last week and didn’t check her voicemail because she just couldn’t cope with the possibility that someone might want her to do something. I’m wanting to maximize the chances of success, so I think it’s best to keep it small.

Sigh. Well, it’s all about setting off down the road again, right?

Oh, and guess what? Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’m 41. Let’s hear it for good friends who want to take you out to dinner, even when you’re in kind of a cranky place!

And thank you to all of you, too. I so appreciate the messages of support, and the honesty that you all bring to your own blogs. It’s such a freakin’ relief every time one of you says “Yeah, me too.” Thanks for sharing yourselves with me.

Weekly Weigh-In, and Being OK with Being Not That OK

2007-06-10T21:52:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 232
Change this week: -1
Total change: -8

Well. Color me shocked. To have lost a pound after the week I’ve had is a miracle indeed. I feel as if my body is trying to take good care of me, in spite of my utter lack of regard for its well-being. Thank you, body. I will try to treat you well in return, and I apologize for what I’ve been doing to you lately.

I started to write “it’s been a tough week.” In reality, it’s been a tough 2007 thus far, though most of the things that have happened have happened to loved ones rather than to myself directly. I have friends coping with injuries that seem to be in the process of becoming chronic, marital infidelity and broken relationships, pregnancies that are not going well…the list goes on. I’ve been relatively lucky so far, with my only woes to date being the job that I did not get this week and some tough-ish times with my father. But I’ve become aware lately of the cost of supporting my loved ones while they go through these things. Not that I am complaining—I feel lucky to be able to be there to help out and listen and do whatever else I can do. But I can feel a certain amount of chronic stress building up.

I am a person, as I’ve said before, who really, really likes to feel competent and unflappable. Bulletproof, even. Go ahead, throw anything at me! I can take it! I will be there, with my compassionate, ever unshakable and ever wise self, ready to listen and to offer feedback. Oh, and I’ll do stuff around the house for you as well! And none of it will affect me in the least. Other than I’ll, you know, feel appropriately sorry for you.

But it does affect me. A good friend of mine (and one of the above-referenced women for whom 2007 has thus far been a big kick in the ass) said recently “When I was a kid, one of the things I never realized about being a grownup was that sometimes you have to work really hard to be OK.” She’s right. I’m just starting to admit to myself that I’m having to work really hard to be OK these days.

I was at a good-bye party last night for a friend who is leaving town to move out to the west coast. He’s never been happy in the Midwest and I am certain that he will never be back here. He’s someone I’ve become very close to, and I found myself nearly strangled with tears from the moment I saw him at the party last night. I’m starting to cry now, just writing about it. I was sort of amazed at the strength of my grief…I mean, there’s email, there are planes, we’ll probably run into each other at conferences, etc. etc. etc. I think, though, that my sadness is about so much more than just losing my friend. It is about that, of course, but it’s also about all the stress and sadness that I’ve been denying in myself the last six months. Saying goodbye to him just gently tipped me over the top, and I can no longer tell myself how very OK I am right now. I mean, I am OK, in the sense that I can still function at work and socialize and do the things I need to do in my daily life. I will be OK, in the sense that at some point life will feel easier than it does right now. But if I’m truthful with myself, my heart’s not OK. It is bruised and sad, and it needs me to recognize and honor that.

So. My goal this week is to be honest with myself, and to be honest with you all, and to stop pretending that it’s all good and that I am the very goodest of them all. Granted, it’s not a diet-specific goal, but I believe that learning to be honest with myself and not needing to be a perfect vision of infallibility all the time can only help me need the comfort of food less.

Somebody Should Get a Prize...

2007-06-09T11:07:00.001-05:00

I had my 1000th visitor this morning, according to my site meter. That's kinda cool. Well, whoever you were, thanks for visiting and taking a peek around. And thanks, of course, to those of you who come and visit often, leave your sweet and supportive comments and remind me that I'm not alone in my lurching and flailing path.

Not much time for a real post today, but I'll write some more tomorrow. It's been a long week on multiple fronts. I found out yesterday that I didn't get a job that I thought I was quite well suited for. I'm more surprised than hurt, as it wasn't a job that I was all that excited about, but it raises questions about my interviewing skills, among other things. Not a fun experience, being passed over, but I'll live. Mission Eat-Healthy has been on hold this week as well.

Anyway, more tomorrow. I'm off to make fruit salad for a party. Have a happy Saturday!

If I do Nothing Else...

2007-06-05T19:56:00.000-05:00

I can still post.

I’m forcing myself to do that, actually. I just kind of hit a wall today, speaking in terms of motivation and self-discipline. I had lunch plans and had my lunch all packed, but then my plans changed. So I ended up in the work cafeteria, and the salad bar was awful looking. So, what did I have? Fried chicken, a biscuit and baked beans. Then, on the way home, I was hypoglycemic and cranky due to my crap lunch, and I stopped at the grocery store for dinner. Plan: buy a rotisserie chicken and some broccoli. Plan as executed: bought rotisserie chicken, broccoli, thai peanut wrap and package of cinnamon coffee cake. Got home, ate the wrap and nibbled all the cinnamon parts of the coffee cake and threw the rest away.

The truth ain’t pretty, people.

Sigh. Nor is my state of mind right now. I feel whiny, full of excuses and rationalizations and empty of optimism. I’m also wanting to work up some compassion for myself, but I vascillate between saying to myself “It’s OK. Your life is hard right now,” and saying “Your life is always going to be hard. That’s the way life is. DEAL WITH IT.”

This entry sucks to write. Yet it feels so important. I am a person who works so very hard to appear as if I have it all under control. I come across as confident and basically unflappable, as I’ve been told many times. I HATE to confess feelings of inadequacy, confusion, hopelessness or helplessness. And yet that small secret voice we all have whispers exactly those things to me. When my friends and I would sit around and moan about our insecurity and inadequacy in graduate school, I would moan along with them, but inside I would be thinking “They don’t know how reallyreallyreallyreally true it is for me. I am such a fake, such a total, faking faker they can’t even imagine.” And yet on the outside, I am the one that everyone comes to, and everyone trusts with their hard stuff, and everyone applauds as strong and kind and unfailingly fail-proof.

So here I am, writing the hardest kind of thing for me to write, which is an entry about feeling like a melted, gooey puddle of self-improvement failure. And I know all the words; I know all the stuff I leave in comments on other people’s blogs about how it’s a journey, and it’s all about putting one foot in front of the other, and when you fall down or get lost or get distracted you just gather yourself up again and just take that one step. And then some more steps.

Those are good words; they are words that I believe, even if they seem like words for someone else tonight. So. I took a step. I cleaned the meat off of the previously mentioned rotisserie chicken, and I made a healthy lunch for tomorrow.

Weekly Weigh-In

2007-06-03T23:35:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 233
Change this week: +5
Total change: -7

Well, the damage wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. It’s clear to me, though, that family visits (and in particular, those that involve my father) are going to pose a challenge that I need to figure out how to navigate. I returned home last Tuesday evening, and it took me until Saturday sometime to begin to feel a sense of inner equilibrium again. This is embarrassing to me—I’m 40 years old, and I’m so easily knocked out of whack by my father.

During my flab-blasting adventure of 2000, somehow I was able to do better with the visits home. There were a few things that were different. One was that I began to exercise and change my eating habits in August, and I didn’t venture home that year until the holidays in December. I had lost 20 lbs or so at that point, and I had quite a bit of momentum behind me. I remember resolving to eat however and whatever I wanted, comfortable with the knowledge that I’d get back to my own life and repair any damage that had occurred. Certainly, things were less stressful with my family; my father was in better shape than he is now, and my brothers both lived closer, so we all saw each other more often, and all of us siblings shared similar perspectives on how to deal with father-management issues when they arose.

But the family-stress issue isn’t the real problem, and I know this. The truth is that back in 2000, the weight-loss thing just clicked with me somehow. I got into a groove where it made sense, I felt motivated and I was able to make healthy choices even in the face of the stress inherent in the life of a graduate student.

You know what else it was? I had fallen in crazy, unrequited love. Every time I wanted a bowl of ice cream or a slab of garlic bread I would think “What do you want, the ice cream or …HIM?” Just about every time, I chose him. He lived in my neighborhood as well, so I was motivated to go out for walks by the chance of running into him, which I did fairly frequently. The interesting thing is that, while we had a fairly intense friendship, our relationship remained non-romantic, and this turned out to be unbelievably productive, from a weight-control standpoint. I yearned and pined and lost weight, feeling that I’d be more attractive to him.

Ultimately, I came to my senses and realized that for various reasons, he was not the one for me. I ended up meeting someone else, with whom I also fell in love, but this time it was mutual. And in the course of that four year relationship, I regained all the weight I had lost, and then some. So here’s the part that I’ve been thinking about lately. There was something energizing about pursuing this guy. The chase gave me the motivation to do good things for myself, even if the surface motivation was to land me this big ol’ fish o’ love. But then I actually do land a love-fish, and I start sabotaging myself. Insecurity? Basic fear of being committed to someone? This bears more thinking about, I believe, but not tonight. It's late and I'm ready for bed.

Have a happy week!

A 40th, and a First

2007-06-01T20:48:00.001-05:00

Today’s the 40^th anniversary of the release of my favorite album of all time. I could write pages and pages and pages on what this album has meant to me over the years; it was my first rock n’ roll record (I was 6, I believe), and it changed how I listened to music, thought about the world, etc. I still get a visceral, gut-level reaction when I hear a track off of it.

What music/band/album/etc. changed your world?

And, this afternoon after work, I had my first-ever massage! Oh my. It was lovely.

Family Wreckage

2007-05-30T20:52:00.000-05:00

I didn’t weigh in on Sunday, which the observant among you might’ve noticed. I was out of town, visiting family and stuffing myself with that most reliable of all comforts. I got back late last night, and I haven’t weighed myself… I just can’t bring myself to do it yet.

It was a tough trip. I was looking forward to it in many ways, because it’s a rare event indeed to have both of my brothers and myself in one place at one time. One of my brothers is married and lives in Africa with his wife and two kids. I see him and his family a couple of times a year, but rarely with my other brother. We all agreed a few months ago to meet up for the long Memorial Day weekend at my father’s house for a visit. Then two weeks ago, my father had a fairly serious car accident. He was banged up a bit but otherwise hardly hurt at all, but it was a scary wreck and one that was entirely his fault. He is going to be 81 in a few months and has had several accidents in the last five years, though none of them this serious. The fact of this accident changed the whole atmosphere of the visit. My brothers and I agreed that our father needs to quit driving, and the visit became about convincing him to agree to this perspective as well. Our mother passed away several years ago, so the burden of this process falls to us. I knew that confronting him on this issue would be tough, but the part I didn’t foresee was that there would be tension between my brothers and myself as well, given that we had very different ideas about how to approach our father.

Ultimately, I chose to talk to him by myself. It was a sad, difficult conversation. My relationship with my father has always been complicated, but I hated to see him being by turns sad, defiant, irrational, angry… He fought back by attempting to create a distraction in the form of “observations” about my relationship with him and how he has felt unloved by me. I am proud of how I handled all this, in a way—I remained focused on the issue at hand, which is whether or not he should drive the car, and I refused to get baited into some side argument about my not being a loving enough daughter. But still, I feel bad to see the man I once admired so much, and whose admiration I so craved, being peevish, angry and irrational. To see him reduced, somehow. And to know that I had a hand in that, whether or not it’s ultimately for his own good.

So, what did I do with this tension and this sadness? I don’t even need to say, because you all know. But I’ll say anyway: I ate. I ate bowls of cereal at midnight, just like I used to. I snacked on trail mix and chips all day. Some fruit, too, but it might as well have been pieces of cardboard, so little did I notice what went into my mouth.

As I said, I haven’t weighed. I don’t have any idea what I gained. I want to focus on getting my equilibrium back, on feeling in control again. Obviously, I need to know the number. Maybe Sunday. Yes, definitely Sunday. I can commit to that much.

Sick

2007-05-24T18:28:00.000-05:00

Bleh—I’m home sick today. I had crampy, middle-of-the-cycle pelvic pain all day yesterday at work, and I’ve always been one of those women who gets at least a twinge of pain around ovulation, so I thought not much of it. I went out with a friend after work and noticed that the pain began to increase, so we called it a night early and I went home. I woke up in the middle of the night with chills, fell asleep and woke up later with the kind of dry, baking heat that you know without even getting your thermometer is a fever. I’m thinking that I should’ve maybe gone to the emergency room, but I never quite woke up enough to do anything other than whimper a little and feel sorry for myself. Finally, I woke up again around 4am feeling utterly wrung out but with a clear sense that my little quickie fever had broken.

So I called in sick today, as I just couldn’t picture walking from the parking lot to my office, let alone spending the day being useful to others. It felt weird—I NEVER call in sick—but I’m glad that I did. I slept till 10:45 and have spent the day drinking loads of water, eating not much and laying around. I’m still not ready to take on the world, but I’m lots better, and whatever organ was behaving like an angry stepchild in my abdomen has calmed down.

Here’s the bit that has to do with weight-loss/body issues (in case you were wondering): All day, laying around feeling like low-energy, glum, sweaty crap, I’ve caught myself repeatedly being self-critical. It’s as if some rational part of my brain can acknowledge that something was wrong with me and I need a day of recovery. But there’s some deeper part of me, one that speaks in a barely audible whisper, that tells me how all of this is my fault. It says “You’re feeling punk because you don’t exercise enough. How can you expect to ever feel chipper and healthy if you lay around like you always do.” What the hell? If any real life, outside-my-own-head person told me this, I’d shake my head in wonder and dismiss them. But the voice inside my head? From in there, it has the tiny, horrible ring of truth.

It’s been this way since I was little. I had my first asthma attack at age 3, after playing in a pile of leaves and having a big allergic reaction. I don’t remember feeling the least bit self-critical about that. But as I got a little older, I gradually got chubbier and less good at the athletics, and I came to see the whole thing—the whole sad, fat, unathletic, wheezy package that was me—as somehow my fault. I thought I was asthmatic because I was chubby, and I was chubby because I was somehow essentially lazy. I became so embarrassed about my failings that I never told anyone how I felt, which is too bad because someone might have been able to set me straight about the causes of asthma and how it was not my fault. It took me years of therapy to untangle that sad little ball of beliefs and to realize that it still rolls around in my head and informs how I feel about myself. At least now I can recognize it, and I can fight back. Still, when I remember what that felt like, I feel sorry for the little girl I was. She deserved to feel better about herself. Maybe now I can finally help her out with that.

So Far, So Good

2007-05-21T20:10:00.001-05:00

Well. Look at me. After I wrote yesterday's mammoth entry, I got out and went for a walk. Whoo-hoo! And then, today I took the stairs at work. I actually started to cave in and take the elevator, but then I thought of all of you. I thought of how I'd have to come home and admit defeat on the very first day of the week, and I hauled my big ol' self up to the third floor.

Oh, and then...a big bowl of potato chips at dinner tonight, and guess who had not one single chip? Luna, that's who!

I know, I'm a hero.

OK, I'm done being a dork now.

Weekly Weigh-In, and Mini-Goals for the Week

2007-05-20T13:18:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 228
Change this week: -1.5
Total change: -12

OK, I’m cheating a little here. Official weigh-in day is Sunday, and this morning I actually weighed 229.5. However, I also weighed in on Friday morning, and the scale showed 228. So, I’m going with that.

I had the thought this week that maybe I should be keeping track of measurements as well, as I can feel my shape changing a little, and that would be a nice source of motivation. I have been too lazy to do so as of yet, but I could probably get myself to do it every couple of weeks. I think I’ll make that a mini-goal.

I’m getting a little impatient about the slow pace of my weight loss. Don’t get me wrong—I’m happy about it, it’s going in the right direction, it took a long time to pack all of this lard on, and it’ll take a while to get it off, etc. etc. etc. I do know all that, and reminding myself of it is helpful. The hard thing, though, is that I’m comparing my nearly-41-year-old, perimenopausal self to the comparative weight-loss machine I was six years ago. Back then, my metabolism was a little zippier, I was more energetic and I was less achy. I was also in the middle of graduate school, and while that was stressful and demanding, my schedule was more variable and allowed for things like walks in the middle of the day and more meals eaten at home. Because I started at a lower weight, walking (my fave exercise) was easier for me from the start, too.

The aches and pains thing is both a motivator and a challenge for me. I look at myself, with my tendency toward plantar faciitis, chronically cranky knees and the occasional twinge of lower back pain, and I’m horrified. People my age are not supposed to be in chronic pain, even if, as in my case, it’s annoying rather than debilitating. This makes me want to take better care of myself, given that I hope to be around for the next 40-50 years, and I don’t want those years to be lived riding around on a motorized scooter or recovering from joint-replacement surgery.

But…I also use those aches as an excuse. There is no escaping the fact that for weight loss and better health, I need to get up and move this bulk around. There are plenty of things I could do that would be lower-impact than walking, if that’s what would be most comfortable for now. Anything that would get me moving would be good: a yoga class, some swimming, a Curves membership… A friend and I have discussed hiring a personal trainer together, as that somehow seems less intimidating.

Good ideas, all. I am so full of excuses, though, that I can feel my mind generating them as I type. I’m just going to write them all out, so that we can all share a good laugh together at the lameness that is my thinking around this issue:

I get home too late to take walks in the evening. (No, you don’t. You get home at about 7:30 on Mondays, but otherwise you’re home by 6:30 most nights, and it’s light until about 8:00 these days)

I need to lose more weight first so that I won’t further injure my knees/feet when I walk. (Not really. There are loads of things you could do that would allow you to be active but would not add to the jackhammering your feet and joints get daily just from carrying you around.)

Curves is lame. (How do you know? You’ve never been to one)

Curves doesn’t have the range of stuff that I might want to do for exercise. (Like sitting on the couch? That seems to be your activity of choice these days, and it’s true that Curves probably does not offer that one.)

A “real” gym would be too intimidating. (How do you know? You’ve never been to one. Are you thinking that people go to the gym specifically to watch out for insecure fat people and mock their feeble attempts to work out?)

A personal trainer would get impatient with my weak, out-of-breath, out-of-shape, general lack of physical awesomness. (Right, because personal trainers only want to be bothered with folks who are already registered for the Ironman Triathlon and just want to fine-tune their workout regimen a little. And God forbid you should try anything at which you are not already completely awesome.)

Choosing to exercise will be easier once I don’t weigh as much. (Exercising itself may be a little easier, but choosing to exercise will be exactly the same struggle it is right now. Get used to that and figure out how to get over it.)

Hmph.

Well. All private whining (now made public for your reading enjoyment) aside, this exercise thing is a wall I need to find a way over. Some mini-goals are in order:

Take the stairs at work this week.

Take a walk after work at least two times. I’m not specifying any particular distance. For this week, success will consist of putting on the sneaks and hitting the sidewalk.

Start recording measurements.

Have a good week, everyone!

Progress Pays a Visit

2007-05-15T18:34:00.000-05:00

...and I nearly don't notice.

I'm sitting at my desk this morning doing paperwork, and I realize my bra is driving me nuts. The straps are falling down, it's riding up in the back, the cups are all wonky...

What the hell? sez I...this used to be my favorite bra! I yank and tug and proceed to get a good grump on, given that it's only 9am and I have to wear this thing all day. Then it dawns on me...

It's too big.

But wait, no. It can't be. I probably just stretched it out from wearing it a lot lately...

OK, but you washed it this weekend and haven't worn it since. Really! It's too big! You, Luna, have lost a little weight!

So I locked my office door, pulled my shade and made some adjustments. Shortened the straps a bit, used the second set of hooks instead of the first, and I was back in action, with (slightly smaller) breasts properly supported and my grump replaced by an internal grin.

Hee!

Weekly Weigh-In

2007-05-13T16:26:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 229.5
Change this week: -6
Total change: -10.5

OK, damage from week before last corrected, and now I’m feeling more like I’m back on course. I didn’t have the greatest week, from the perspective of pre-planning meals, but I guess it was good enough. I find that I go through periods of time where I just can’t get my act together to cook enough of something to give me lunches for the week, or I don’t seem to have the mental resources to figure out how to navigate food at a party so that I eat healthily. I struggled with both of those things this week. I started out last Sunday with a head of broccoli to steam and a bunch of chicken breasts to season and cook up. That would’ve set me up for the week. But instead I let the broccoli get all soft and icky in my fridge, and the chicken sat there alongside it, getting more and more suspect-looking and giving me the stinkeye every time I opened the door. Then there was a potluck party Friday evening with some co-workers, and I didn’t do very well there. I totally caved in to the pressure to try someone’s baked beans, and someone else’s root beer cake (sounds completely foul, tasted OK)…Sigh. Social events are going to be an ongoing challenge for me.

However, all that being the case, I still managed to eat according to plan for most of the week, and I’m happy to have erased my six lb gain. I’m now at a place where I’ve been many times before, where I’ve lost 10 lbs, I’m feeling hopeful, and then somehow it all falls apart. Some things are different this time, though. First of all, I’m living by myself now, which I was not the last couple of times I tried to diet. I used to live with my boyfriend, who had a couple of adolescent sons, and the house was an obstacle course of frozen pizzas, cookies, ice cream and chips (of course, the three of them were all naturally thin—bastards). I was never strong enough to sustain a particular way of eating for very long.

Secondly, I’m under less stress. The last few years have been fairly crazy, what with finishing grad school, doing a more-than-full-time internship, breaking up with aforementioned boyfriend and re-learning how to be a single person…I coped, I got through it all and came out the other end with my sense of humor and love of my career still intact, but I did lose my focus on my physical well-being in there somewhere. Now my life is calmer in many ways, and I am finding that I have a little bit of surplus energy that can go toward self-care and the establishment of some healthier, happier habits.

Finally, I’m blogging. This has been exactly what I had hoped it would be—a way to connect with other like-minded people who have similar struggles and often better answers that I’ve been able to come up with on my own. I feel supported, understood and inspired by you wonderful folks—both those of you who stop by here to visit and comment, and those of you who share your lives and thoughts in your own blogs that I read.

The journey is long, but thanks to you all, it’s not lonely.

Weekly Weigh-In, Week Whatever

2007-05-07T20:29:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 235.5
Change this week: +6
Total change: -4.5

Six pounds. Six pounds gained over the course of four days of unprincipled eating. My body amazes me sometimes. I choose to believe that it’s mostly water weight, so just go with me on that one, OK? A girl needs her denial sometimes.

Here’s the good news, though. My goal, if you’ll remember, was to eat calmly. I didn’t define that concept very well when I wrote about it, but what I meant was that I was not going to allow my emotions to define what or how much I ate. In that, I was successful. I did eat a lot, and I ate plenty of things that were off plan, and I drank quite a bit of alcohol and I didn’t drink enough water. However, I never ate to the point of being stuffed, and I never did what I was afraid I was going to do, which was to leave my father at the hotel and drive by McDonald’s and/or Taco Bell and/or wherever else to comfort myself. This in and of itself feels great.

Lest I get too sunny here, I also need to say that I’m kind of afraid. In the past, I’ve lost the same 10 lbs a bunch of times, and I’m scared that I can no longer get beyond that 10 lb mark for some reason. I’m trying to be rational and remind myself that I did this once before, and I had the same fears then. But I was able to do it. The fear remains, however, and it’s something I need to grapple with and get beyond.

Sigh. This is a topic for a longer post, and I have many things to do this evening. For now, I’m back on the wagon, doing my best John Wayne imitation and fixin’ to get tough on this eatin’ thang (thanks, Squilla, for that whole John Wayne image! I’m working on my low-carb swagger. Maybe I need some chaps).

The Wagon, and My Fall From It

2007-05-04T17:43:00.000-05:00

Spent Wednesday night in Chicago, hanging out with my former dissertation director, who has become more a friend than director of anything in particular. We were excited to have a night in the Big City before my conference paper Thursday morning, and we decided to go out for tapas, a culinary treat that hasn’t really hit Milwaukee yet.

The point of tapas, for anyone who’s not familiar with the phenomenon, is that you order a bunch of small, generally Spanish dishes (the size of a pretty small appetizer, maybe) rather than one large entrée for each of you. It’s fun because you get to try many different things that way. The place we went was one of my favorites from when I lived in the Big City, and I just decided to dive in face-first. It was a wonderful meal, I have to say, and I just couldn’t feel bad about letting my ‘no carbohydrates shall pass these lips’ guard down for the evening. I was concerned, though, that I’d end up reawakening my cravings for carb-laden yummies like breads and rice and potatoes. It doesn’t seem to have happened, though, so that’s good.

What I am experiencing, however, is a fierce urge to binge, which I believe has nothing to do with my dinner the other night. This is more about the man who is winging his way toward me as I type and will soon be arriving to spend the weekend. Ugh.

My plan for the weekend is to eat as calmly as I can. It’s interesting—as I started to write that sentence, I thought, “OK, Luna, just what is the plan here?” My fingers wrote it out for me after a brief pause—to eat calmly. The emotions underlying my bingeing are anxiety and anger, and I want to be aware of them this weekend so that they do not get expressed in the way they usually do. This feels like an interesting experiment. I’ve been inducing a feeling of calmness by putting some boundaries on what I choose to eat, and it’s been working nicely. I wonder what will happen if I only require of myself that I eat without anxiety or anger? I’m not actually sure it’s possible, as I’ll be eating with my father all weekend, and the man’s a virtuoso of negative emotions.

Well, it’s worth a try, anyhow. He’s leaving Sunday night, and I’ll report the results of my experiment along with my weigh-in on Monday evening. I’m guessing that weigh-in won’t be pretty, but whatever. It’s all about the journey, yes?

Weekly Weigh-In, Week Three

2007-04-29T10:32:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 229.5
Change this week: -.5
Total change: -10

Just a small loss this week, though I’m OK with that. My period is here this week, which seems to mean much less predictable things than it used to. When I was younger, I’d get 3 or 4 days of water retention, a day of moodiness and then the start of my period, which would last 3 or 4 days and then be done. Sometime near the end of it I would shed all the water-weight and that would be that. In the last year or so, though, my cycle is completely unpredictable. I occasionally skip a period entirely for no apparent reason, and other times it will come on slowly and meander on for several days.

So I still haven’t figured out if there’s a pattern to the water-retention thing, but I suspect that’s part of what’s at work for me this week. My eating patterns are the same as the past two weeks, and if anything my portions have been a bit smaller because the famed appetite suppressant effect of the Atkins plan has kicked in. Also, I use urine-test strips to monitor levels of ketone bodies excreted so I can get a rough sense of how much fat I’m metabolizing. I know they’re not at all accurate, but they’re pretty motivating for me when the scale itself isn’t helping me out so much on that front. They go from palest pink if you’re just excreting a trace, to deeper and deeper burgundy-purple if there are lots of ketones in your urine. Mine have been almost black all week, which I hope means that I’m still breaking down lots of fat and my body is just doing the camel thing this week. I wonder why we retain water around the time of our periods? In any event, my plan is just to stick to my eating plan, drink lots of water and hope for a whooooosh next week.

In other news, I went out to a bar last night to hear a friend’s band play. I *never* do this anymore, as I’m far too old and my social circle consists mostly of older, sedate people like myself. It was a friendly, hilarious small-town Wisconsin evening of the kind that reminds me why I like living up here. The bar was quite a ways out of Milwaukee, in a little town I’d never even heard of. Once my girlfriends and I were in and situated, the bar owner came over with a tray of shots for us and introduced himself as Uncle Dave. Uncle Dave knew we’d never been in before and wanted to welcome us to his place of business in this most Wisconsin of ways (only in Wisconsin have I ever been to a wedding that featured a tray of various shots for guests to enjoy after they go through the receiving line). He cautioned us that these were not girly shots, but he’d get us something that went down easier if we needed it instead. My knee-jerk reaction to an implied challenge like that is to step right up and show off just how ready I am to play with the big boys, so I grabbed my shot and drank it, as did my girlfriends (nice to know that, mature mental-health professionals that we are, we still crack like an egg to a tiny bit of peer pressure from a man we don’t even know). Wow. It was something called ‘the Knot,’ and it went down smoothly and sweetly but then burned in our stomachs for about 10 minutes afterward. After we grabbed and gulped, Uncle Dave clapped me on the shoulder and said “Good girls! That’s 100 proof!” Never let it be said that I don’t attempt to adapt to my surroundings, whatever they might be.

That, and another couple of mixed drinks, and I’m feeling it this morning. And here’s where all of this has to do with my own attempts to mend my relationship with my body. I was walking up to the grocery store this morning and feeling as if I were dragging a piano behind me. Sluggish, slow, just generally bleh. And for the better part of the walk I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but then it dawned on me in one of those DUH moments—honey, you’re just a little hungover. I’ve gotten so good at ignoring my body that I’ve really lost track of the simple law of cause and effect. I’ve let myself believe for years that my body is just going to do whatever it wants, and that I have little to no control over those ups and downs. But DUH. I drank more than I’m used to, and today I feel kinda grubby. No big mystery, and entirely controllable. No more Knots, no more feeling like this on Sunday morning.

Not a huge insight, but good enough to start me out on my week.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...

2007-04-27T19:59:00.000-05:00

…and staying for the whole weekend? My dad. I live here in the Midwest, where I’ve settled post-graduate school, and he lives in Colorado, in the same house where I grew up from the age of 10 on. Those 1200 miles between us feel about right to me. I get home to visit about twice a year, once over the winter holidays and once for his birthday in mid-summer. I often try to combine my visit with that of one or both of my brothers, one of whom lives part of the year in Colorado as well and part of the year in Italy, and the other of whom lives in Tanzania. So I’m rarely there alone with my father, which works well for me.

When I’m with him, I feel uglier, fatter, more ashamed, less competent and less confident than at any other time in my life. His heart would break to hear this, but it’s true. He was the one that first delivered the news to me that I was fat, 35 years ago now, and he’s never let up. He’s never bothered to hide the fact that he finds me…well, lacking in some ways that he deems critical for the females in his family. In particular, he is distressed by my weight, but also by my general lack of feminine pizzazz.

This is the man who once suggested, in all sincerity, that perhaps I ought to check with some women to see if they can teach me how to wear scarves and jewelry and things, so that I could maybe snazzy up my look a little. This is the man who has been so ashamed of my looks in the past that he felt the need to prepare some old family friends in advance for my appearance when we went to see them for a visit after many years. I never would have known but for the wife of the couple, who told me that my father had taken pains to tell them how big I’d gotten so that they would not be surprised (I weighed around 200 at that point). She said “I was ready for you to weigh 400 lbs from the way he was describing you.” This is the man who would talk rapturously about the handsomeness of my brothers (which they are—no argument there) and then say “And you, Luna…(long significant pause while he fishes for something not-too-brutal to say), you could be as attractive as you’ve a mind to be.” Good catch, Pop. All of this is just a willful rejection of societal beauty ideals. I just FEEL like being overweight and soul-crushingly self-conscious.

This is the man who taught me that I just wasn’t good enough. He was my first mirror, and I learned from him that mirrors were never going to deliver good news.

I was once at a birthday sleepover when I was about eight. The birthday girl’s grandfather was there, and he took a liking to me. Not in a creepy way, at least not that I remember. He made some mention in passing of my pretty chestnut hair. I was over the moon that someone (and a MAN!) saw something of beauty in me. I came home the next day and, desperate for some little crumb of the same experience from my father, I said something about my hair and its chestnut color. He looked up and said “It’s really more walnut,” and went back to whatever he was doing. Color me crushed. I mean, he’s right. It is more walnut. Actually, it’s the color of espresso beans, should we wish to be precise about this. But I felt like a beggar who held out my tin cup for a donation and got a rock in it.

Guilt compels me to say that he is a generous and loving man as well. He is proud of my accomplishments and proud of what he perceives my personality to be. He loves all three of his children fiercely, and we doubt this not at all. I feel that I should be more able to embrace the good in him. Well, no, that’s not exactly it. I can embrace the good. There is much about him I admire and there’s much that he has done for me and my brothers that I deeply appreciate. I love him.

But the truth remains that my stomach will be in knots and my psyche will be on lockdown until he leaves.

Lunching Alone

2007-04-25T18:51:00.000-05:00

I’ve been weird about social engagements this week. Last week was a hugely social week, with lots of shared meals out in restaurants. I managed to do fine, overall. This week, though, I just don’t seem to be up to the task. Today, for example…I was invited out to lunch with some friends, and I was also invited to the monthly potluck lunch the psychology staff at our hospital holds monthly. All I wanted in the world was to sit in my office, eat my lunch that I brought from home and not have to talk to anyone about what I was eating and why.

So that’s what I did, which was fine. I don’t especially like the way I did it, though—I told the restaurant people that I was going to the potluck, and the potluck people that I was going out to lunch with the restaurant people. I much prefer to be straightforward and honest about things, but I just wasn’t up for the conversation. I’m not even sure what I would have said to either group, besides “No, sorry, not up for it today.”

What bothers me about the whole thing is that I’m feeling kind of rigid and fragile, like I have to protect myself from a situation where I’ll feel uncomfortable or will eat something I regret. Eating in public feels too complicated, though I’ve been able to negotiate it successfully in the very recent past. The monthly potluck is usually a minefield or a gold mine of carbohydrates, depending on your perspective. I didn’t want to sit there and nibble cheese w/no crackers while deflecting offers of poundcake and Cheetos. Maybe I don’t trust myself to make good choices yet.

The bigger issue, though, is my worry about letting people know that I’m trying to lose weight and be healthier. I can’t bear to call attention to myself in that way. I’m embarrassed about my size and embarrassed that I am embarrassed—I’d at least like to be a confident fat woman who embraces her physical self and expects others to do the same, without a self-critical thought in her head. I don’t know; I just feel like people will find me pathetic if I announce I’m changing my eating habits, particularly if they subsequently don’t see my weight change. Why I give a frog’s fat butt about what anyone thinks of me is beyond me. This is old, old shame, I guess, and it seems to be impervious to the self-assurance I’ve built up in other areas of my life.

Weekly Weigh-In, Week Two

2007-04-22T08:35:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 230.5
Change this week: -4.5
Total change: -9.5

After a tough week, things seem to have stabilized a little. I’ve been experimenting some with the suggestions of the kind readers who have left me comments (thank you, AHappyWife, Squilla and *S*!). Here are a few of the things that have helped me with the cravings:

Brushing teeth! Sounds nutty, yes? Well, to me it sort of feels like cleaning up the kitchen and then deciding that you’re not going to dirty things up again by cooking a big feast.

Eating a relatively small amount of something with really big flavor and texture. I got this idea from S’s comment about eating mandarin oranges with coconut. While that specific treat would not be my thing, particularly, it’s got loads of flavor and a nice texture thing going on, what with the plump, juicy fruit and the crunchy coconut. I’m a big fan of strongly flavored things like marinated olives, and I’m finding that a few of something like that gives my mouth something to think about for a while. My current fave is a jar of big green olives, each stuffed with a clove of garlic. It’s a flavor/texture circus, let me tell you— the yielding, smooth, slightly rubbery flesh of the olive, the crunch of the clove inside, the saltiness, the garlicky bite. Mmmmm.

Also, sometimes I’ve found that it works to just stop and experience the craving as fully as possible, to kind of sink into the experience of it and just sit with it rather than having to jump up and respond with action. I’m trying to incorporate more mindfulness into my life in many ways, and this has been an interesting experience. Somehow, fully experiencing that craving seems to lessen my need to actually do anything about it.

Another challenge this week: I’ve been struggling with the thought that I will have to live with this battle raging inside me forever if I really want to embrace a different way of eating and being. One of the things that brings me some sense of comfort when I get overwhelmed with the enormity of this struggle is to take it all one day at a time. I loved the quote that AHappyWife shared: I don't have to do anything forever, I just have to do it for today. That’s one to needlepoint on a pillow or tattoo on the back of your hand.

Oh, and I also did some behavioral things yesterday that just helped me feel generally more in control. Just basic stuff like laundry, straightening up, cleaning the bathroom, etc., but it helped me feel like I had addressed some of my external chaos, so I could allow the internal chaos to resolve a bit as well.

I am pleased that despite the cranky, difficult week I had, I managed to stick to my eating plan. I’ve been able to stay under 25 grams of carbohydrate, eating mainly steamed or fresh veggies and chicken breasts, with a few meals of eggs or beef thrown in, and a couple of nice big chef salads. I’ve snacked on nuts or cheese (or my yummy olives) as needed, mostly in the mid-afternoon to guard against being so crazy hungry by the time I get home from work that I’m ready to grab a squirrel out of the yard and eat him whole (I guess there would be worse things to grab on impulse; a squirrel, while gross, would not be a violation of my current eating plan. I bet they taste nasty, though.).

Anyway, I’ve gotten through this week, the sun is shining today here in the cold upper Midwest, and I’m hoping for a better week ahead.

This is Hard

2007-04-19T22:03:00.000-05:00

It's been a challenging week. Lots of eating out, lots of craving things that will not be healthy for me, lots of feeling cranky. I keep thinking "What if it's always this hard? What if I have to fight this fight every day in order to get and stay thinner and healthier?" It's an overwhelming feeling, and it makes me understand why in Alcoholics Anonymous they encourage people to think in terms of "just for today." So that's what I've been trying to do: Just for today I'll eat what I packed for lunch, and nothing else. Just for today I'll say no to the homemade apple cake in the break room, I'll drink plenty of water, I'll choose to eat for health rather than comfort.

But grrrrrrr. It feels hard this week.

I think I've got hormones working against me as well. I caught myself today thinking morosely that my supervisors don't really like me, my coworkers just tolerate me, my friends are growing weary of me, etc. This is usually a sign that I'm PMS'ing, as I'm not usually so prone to such thoughts. It used to be that my period came and went like clockwork, so I had some warning and could sort of predict when I'd be in a crappy, self-pitying mood. Since entering my 40's, though, things have gotten really irregular on the monthy cycle front, and it's anybody's guess as to when the hormonal tide will turn. The zits, the crankiness, the cravings...well, I'd say the tide it is a-turning just about now.

That's all for now, I guess. This feels hard, but I'm still doing it. I've managed to stay on-plan all week thus far, and the toughest of it is over. I've managed to negotiate the situations that challenged me, and now I just have to manage ME.

Dinner as Relapse

2007-04-16T21:21:00.000-05:00

Sigh. Sugar is like crack to me.

I wrote here about the challenge of social situations, and one of them was my weekly Monday night dinner at the halfway house for addicts in recovery. Tonight it was just impossible to eat like I’d want to. First off, these guys are just not salad dudes. We always end up with some meaty entrée and a big starchy side dish. Often I can just take some meat and a bit of the starchy whatever, take a little taste of it and then push it around on my plate.

Tonight, though, two problems. The first was that the main dish was sloppy joes. For anyone outside of the US who is not familiar with the sloppy joe phenomenon, they are sandwiches with ground beef cooked in a tomato-y sauce that usually has a fair amount of sugar in it. You eat them on hamburger buns, and they’re pretty darn tasty. So, no way to avoid the sugar there, though I did eat mine open-faced, on a slice of whole-wheat bread rather than a white-bread bun.

The second problem was the GIANT BOWL OF POTATO SALAD that accompanied the main course. And the gentleman who made the potato salad and was quite proud of his first attempt at doing so was sitting right next to me. So I put a smallish glop of it on my plate, and he said “Oh, here, it’s really good, you’re going to want more!” He reached over and PLOP—fixed me up with a big hefty pile of it.

Well, I took my time and nibbled a bit of it and ate my semi-virtuous open-faced sandwich. I could just feel my palate tingling with sugar-love and potato-lust. Oh, white minions of Satan! Vile, carby temptresses! I will not succumb to your siren song!

The potato thing I’ve kind of gotten over in the couple of hours since dinner’s been over, but I’m sitting here craving something sugary like you wouldn’t believe. After I left the dinner/meeeting I went shopping to distract myself, and now I’m sitting here writing and sipping tea in an effort to tell my body to just chill out. Yes, crack may make us feel good in the short term, but we really don’t like all of the collateral effects—the weight gain, the shame, the loss of control. Not to mention the crappy sugar-hangover the next day. Who needs that? I got me some tea, some will-power and some words to write, and I shall ride out the craving until it turns into something else. Sleepiness, probably.

Just out of curiosity, what do you all do when the cravings hit? I could use some new weapons in my arsenal.

Weekly weigh-in

2007-04-15T09:24:00.000-05:00

Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 235
Change this week: -5
Total change: -5

One week, and 5 lbs gone! It’s mostly water-weight, I have no doubt, but I’ll take it. The challenges this week were social ones, as I posted about here. Yesterday I had both lunch and dinner out, which was tough. I think it would work best to declare a moratorium on dining out during this early phase of trying to lose weight and re-adopt some healthier eating, but I can’t bring myself to do that. I have a wonderful bunch of friends, and we tend to enjoy meeting after work or on the weekends to eat and then go do something. It’s kind of a cornerstone of my social life. And besides, I guess I feel like I need to learn to eat out in the world, not only in my own kitchen.

As I think I’ve mentioned, the plan I’m sticking to for now is low-carb and relatively high protein. I’ve been eating a lot of lean meat this week, and LOADS of broccoli, which I detest raw but really like when it’s steamed. Last weekend I steamed up a big bunch and took it for lunch all week, which I think I’ll do again this week. This way of eating works really well for me, especially once I’ve liberalized it a bit to include some fruits. I’m always surprised at how much energy I have when I’m avoiding bread, potatoes, rice, sugar, etc. I’ve always been prone to hypoglycemia, and often if I have a big, carby lunch, by dinnertime I’m weak, lightheaded, ravenous and absolutely unable to make a healthy choice about what to eat for dinner. When I’m doing the low-carb thing, though, by dinnertime I’m usually hungry, but in a pleasant rather than desperate way.

It also feels good emotionally to have a sense of being back in control. That’s a welcome contrast to the way I was feeling a couple of weeks ago, and one I hope I’ll be able to maintain.

So—my goals for last week were to bring my lunch to work and to avoid the fast food trap that I have so often fallen into after work. I am happy to say that I accomplished both! Yay me. I did eat in the food court at the mall yesterday with a friend, but they had a fast food Chinese place where I got chicken and broccoli with minimal sauce. Still, I’m counting this as a success.

My goal for this week is a simple one, but it’s going to bug me. I need to start measuring things. I don’t do that and I don’t like doing it, but I know that I have no sense any longer of what a serving size is. I’m not going to bother for things like my dinner serving of meat and veggies—for that I figure I can eat as much as I like, as it’s not much of a temptation. Where I get into trouble is with snack things, like ¼ cup of nuts or a tablespoon of peanut butter. When I attempt to eyeball it, I go way over what I mean to have, and that’s a source of a lot of ‘hidden’ calories and carbs for me.

So, there you have it. My past week and plans for the coming week in a big, wordy nutshell.

Happy Sunday!

Meet & Eat

2007-04-12T10:22:00.000-05:00

Social events are hard. When I’m eating by myself, I can usually make good choices about foods that fit into my eating plan. Whether I DO make those choices is another matter sometimes, but I’m aware even when I eat poorly that the pressures to do so are coming only from within me.

But being with other people—that gets complicated for me. Like yesterday. I was invited to give a talk over the lunch hour for one of the treatment teams where I work. Lovely, warm people all, and they had informed me that they do a lunch potluck, so I could come and be part of that before my talk. So nice! But such a minefield too. People always want you to try their stuff, and there’s such social interaction around tasting this and that and asking for recipes, etc. I find that I do pretty well on a controlled-carbohydrate diet a la South Beach or Atkins, so I’ve been restricting the carbs pretty severely this week. And let me tell you, it was Fiesta Carb-o-rama around that table. Pasta salads, chips and dip, rice salads, cookies…all stuff that just did not work for me. It’s not like I was hungry—I knew this was coming up and had pre-eaten my own lunch (cheese, hard-boiled eggs and steamed broccoli) before coming over. But I just don’t deal with the social pressure that well. I came out of it pretty unscathed, overall; I had some sugar snap peas that someone brought and a few tablespoons of tabbouleh (made with whole grains, so not as bad as it could be). I’m glad that I was the one talking for the hour, so I had an excuse to not dive in headfirst.

That was just a one-time deal. The tougher thing I do is a weekly dinner I go to at a halfway house that’s part of the mental health program where I work. I’m the staff psychotherapist for the residents of the house, and we meet weekly for dinner and a house meeting/therapy group. Each week one of the residents cooks the meal that we all share, and it’s quite a point of pride for them to do a good job. And there are some fine cooks in this house, let me tell you. You wouldn’t think a bunch of addicts early in their recovery would have found the time to discover and embrace their inner kitchen magicians, but damn. I’m thinking maybe they need their own show on the Food Network. (Having written that, I’m now having fun making up names for that show in my head—heh.)

So the general yummy-ness of the food is an issue, but the harder part is that pressure to ooh and ahh over the food and to eat lots of it, and to be sure I’m equally complimentary to everyone’s culinary efforts. I just haven’t figured out a good way to negotiate this situation, and I basically end up eating a lot of stuff that tastes great and keeps me fat.

Part of the issue is that I just hate talking about my attempts to change my eating habits. It would probably solve the problem were I just to say, “Oh, thanks, but I’m on a diet.” But I feel like making any kind of a public proclamation of my intent renders me and my obesity (as well as my attempts to address that obesity) too damn public. I’d rather have people think that I am just too busy and cool and interested in deep and important things to give my fat a thought.

Le sigh.

That said, though, I’ve been doing pretty well this week. I’ve met my goals thus far: I’ve brought lunch every day so far, and I’ve not had any fast food. I’ve also felt in control of my eating, for the most part. No binges, and I’ve been keeping the carbs to a minimum for the moment.

Hope everyone’s week is going well!

Vanities

2007-04-10T21:48:00.000-05:00

I love my teeth. I come from a family of smokers—folks who puffed until their teeth were yellow like corn niblets and their gums were in need of several painful tune-ups from the local periodontist. Me, I smoked, but only for a short time (I needed to bolster my image as a tortured intellectual in college and the turtleneck and black beret just didn’t quite do it), and I’ve never been a huge coffee drinker.

So, my teeth are pearly, pearly white. Two other relevant facts about my parents is that they were relatively wealthy and relatively status conscious, so they paid to have my naturally, uh… exuberant teeth corralled by the local orthodontist into some semblance of unremarkable straightness. Believe me, I’m not complaining—I looked like a beaver until Dr. K got his hands on me. I can no longer chew the paint off a wall, but I’ve learned to forgo that particular activity in favor of teeth that allow me to close my mouth all the way.

Like I said, I love ‘em. Actually, I’m crazy vain about them. I like to look at them in mirrors, just to remind myself that there’s a part of me that’s pretty. There’s not much about my appearance that I take pleasure in these days, but the teeth have stayed with me, through thick and thin, through bad hair days and bad outfit days… and God bless ‘em, they look exactly the same no matter what I weigh.

So, what about you? What are your secret (or not so secret) vanities?

Cease-fire

2007-04-08T19:18:00.000-05:00

It took the kind words of AHappyWife to remind me how important it is to be gentle with yourself. Her comment got me thinking about how adversarial my relationship with myself has gotten over this whole weight loss thing. I feel as if there are two of me: the timid, wishful person who gosh, if it’s not too much trouble, thinks she might like to lose some weight at some point, and the out-of-control, demanding, childish me, who tantrums and binges JUST BECAUSE SHE FEELS LIKE IT, DAMNIT!!! The timid, dare-not-be-hopeful Luna walks on eggshells around the tyrannical, demanding Luna, secretly afraid of what she might be capable of. Eating until our stomach bursts? Just watch me. Willfully getting so fat that the only thing we can wear is the living room curtains? Heh. Step aside, missy, and let me at that fridge.

So I got to thinking that it’s time to end the madness. It’s time for a cease-fire in this weird internal war over what I choose to put in my mouth and how I choose to feel about my body. I’m uniting this timid, hopeless, powerless part of myself with this other part—the part that wants what I want NOW—and realizing that kindness toward myself can only be a good thing.

Today I did something I’ve never done before, though I’ve recommended it to clients countless times. It feels cheesy and silly, but I think it kind of works. I printed off some little saying for myself, incredibly basic things like You can do it! and Calm, calm, calm… and I put them around the house. Very simple, yet it makes me feel as if we’re all on the same side here, which is a nice way to feel. If AHappyWife can say kind and supportive things to me, I can do the same for myself. Group hug!

The other thing I got to thinking today was that I think too damn much sometimes. Looking back on these posts, they’re things I need to sort out for myself, and if they elicit some comments from someone who feels inspired to tell me “Me too!” so much the better. But I need to make some active, concrete changes as well. I’m still off the Mountain Dew (whoo-hoo!), still eating more salads, etc, but it’s time for a few more Baby Steps.

So, goals for the coming week:

Take my lunch to work every day.I got myself organized today and boiled a bunch of eggs and steamed a few heads of broccoli.I made myself dinner tonight (grilled some lean beef) and have leftovers ready to go for tomorrow.
Lay off the fast food for dinner.This is a hard one for me.I work long days, and by the end of the day I’m shot and I’m hungry.I’m going to take some string cheese with my lunch as kind of a late afternoon snack to gobble between clients, and then when I leave I won’t be ready to eat my own shoes.I’ve got some chicken breasts thawed for an easy dinner thing, which should help with the need for something easy.

Good enough for one week, I think.

Finally, accountability. I have avoided doing the weekly weigh-in thing here, out of fear that I just won’t be able to get it together enough to actually lose some weight, and I’ll have nothing good to report. Well, I resolve to report the numbers weekly, whether they’re good, bad or ugly. It may be that I’ll end up with a fairly unique beast in the blog-o-verse: a weight gain blog. But I don’t think so.

So here’s the big bad number for today: 240 lbs.

OK. That wasn’t so hard. I’ll have to look at how some of the rest of you report your progress to find a format I like, but it’s a start.

Have a good week!

One Big Hunger

2007-04-05T21:44:00.000-05:00

I can’t stop eating. I’m ashamed to even write that, but it’s the truth, and the one thing I need to face and fix above all else. I’ve had this multi-day binge going, culminating today in two (yes, TWO) meals from McDonald’s, complete with a cinnamon melt at each meal.

I know the cause—like many of us, I eat when I feel sad or bereft somehow. It’s a reliable and easily obtained source of comfort, and it does exactly what I expect it to do. And I know why this week has been such a chow-fest; it’s because the anniversary of my mom’s death was yesterday, and though it’s been several years now, that date predictably makes me feel disconnected and sad. So I get it.

Even so. I know, rationally, that anything I can put in my mouth is not going to fill that hole, and bingeing just makes me feel more disconnected and out of control. It increases my feelings of shame and isolation—like if anyone knew the ‘real’ me, they’d be shocked and disgusted.

Did I mention that I’m a psychologist? And worse yet, I’m a psychologist who works with people in residential treatment for drug/alcohol addiction. I spend my days talking with people about addictive behaviors, about finding better ways to address problems and healthier strategies for managing their emotions. And then I go home and sit on the couch with my awful fast-food meal and my sad heart and disregard all of it.

I remember when the connection between food and nurturing became clear to me. I was driving down to visit my maternal grandmother and grandfather once, probably a year or so after my mother died. My grandmother (who is still alive at 99) has never been the warmest, most nurturing grandma, and with my mother gone such a short time, I knew that it was going to be a difficult trip. I began to be obsessed about going hungry while I was there. Now, there’s a wee grain of truth to this concern…as my grandparents aged, they began to make tinier and tinier meals for themselves, until at some point they were each having half of a steamed apple for dinner (no kidding). They’d cook a little more when they had grandkids visiting, and we’d always offer to make dinner, but there literally just wasn’t enough to make a real dinner with. We’d always each end up with about a tablespoon of chicken salad and some canned green beans or something. It wasn’t the kind of grandma’s house one dreams of. So, OK--I was driving down to visit, and all I could think about was how I was going to get enough food while I was there. I considered stopping at a grocery store, or just buying a stash of granola bars to hide in my suitcase or something… and then it just hit me how it was so not about the food. It was about the feeling lonely and sad and missing my mom and wanting a different kind of a grandmother…

Sigh.

So, here I sit, no better for that insight, apparently, and not knowing how on earth I’m going to stomp out this nasty habit I have. Because if I don’t, I’m just going to get bigger and bigger, and I am so afraid of that.

Words of wisdom, anyone? Books to recommend? Mantras, meditations, healing imagery…I’m open to hearing all of it.

Who's that Girl?

2007-04-04T20:40:00.000-05:00

There was a time, not that long ago, where I spent about a year eating in a way that felt controlled, calm and principled. I cooked a lot and enjoyed it. I walked about 3 miles a day and LOVED that in a way that I never thought I could. During that year, I lost about 40 lbs. There were certainly many benefits to that--snazzier clothes, more energy, fewer aches and pains, many compliments from others. But the coolest part, to me, was that for once I felt as if I were in control. I keep coming back to the word calm. I felt calm, unharried, optimistic...and I began to enjoy being in my own skin for the first time since maybe ever. I started paying more attention to makeup, started getting my eyebrows done and wearing toenail polish...all these little things that just made me feel female. Feminine.

And that was really, really cool.

Me and the whole femininity thing…we have kind of a troubled relationship. When I was in kindergarten at age 5, I remember trying to get the little boys to play with me by telling then that my name was really Tiger. (Somehow, they didn't buy it.) I have this absurdly traumatic memory from around the same time of this little Springtime pageant we had to put on, where all the kids had to pair up, and the boys got to be vegetables and the girls got to be flowers. You and your partner decided what kind of flower/vegetable to be and then you (and your mom and dad) made costumes for the show. No other little girl would pair up with me, and the teachers wouldn’t let me be a vegetable with the boys, so some adult had to intervene on my behalf and talk two other happily paired up little flowers into letting me crash their twosome. I was a poppy, and the tallest flower on the stage. It sucked.

I was always tall, always chubby, always more into shorts and sneakers than dresses and barrettes (though, sadly, I was not athletic). I was also one of the earliest girls in elementary school to hit puberty, and oh! The agony. Tall, curvy, bezitted me, with the braces and glasses everyone else got two years later. Odd how my premature female-ness made me feel even more at odds with femininity.

By high school I was dressing so androgynously that I got in trouble once for not responding when the assistant principal addressed me as “young man.” It was the early 1980s, which meant I could and did take refuge in polo shirts, Shetland sweaters, loafers—what all the preppy girls and boys were wearing.

Finally in college I started steppin’ out a little…a jazzy new wave haircut, makeup, even daring to experiment with the clothes a little. But I still wanted to feel girly, and I didn’t. I didn’t, in fact, until my mid-thirties, when I lost the weight mentioned in the first paragraph. Suddenly it began to work for me…and I began to claim it and nurture it. But then, I got into a relationship and started to gain again. I think, much as I enjoyed feeling feminine for once, there was some pressure there too. I felt conspicuous and public. People commented on my weight loss, looked at my body, began to expect things from me. Like more weight loss, for one. And I wasn’t prepared. This time, however, I know what to expect. I hope that knowledge will be enough to keep me from retreating to the comfort of my fat and my invisibility.

Twinkie Thief

2007-03-31T21:18:00.000-05:00

My last post featured an appearance by my father, who certainly contributed to my misery as a fat adolescent (or at least as an adolescent who thought she was unforgivably fat). What about my mother? She passed on several years ago (14 years ago this upcoming Wednesday, in fact), and in her own benign way she also contributed as well.

Don’t get me wrong—she was unfailingly supportive and generally kind to me about my weight issues, and she struggled with dieting and feeling unsatisfied about her appearance as well. But that was the hard part for me. I saw her struggle, and I saw the things that she did in order to lose weight, and I came to believe that it was possible only with the greatest of sacrifices. When I was about 14, she went on a diet because we were going on a trip that summer to see my father’s family, just about all of whom lived overseas. She ended up losing quite a bit of weight, but oh, what she had to do to make that happen. She went on two strenuous walks a day and ate ridiculously—an Alba 77 shake (made with ice and only 77 calories—anybody remember them?) for breakfast, an apple for lunch, and a few bites of whatever we were having for dinner. I look back on that now, and I wonder if she was struggling with a thyroid problem or something, or if she was secretly snacking when no one was looking.

That possibility never occurred to me back then, because as far as I knew, I was the only secret snacker in the family. I would eat reasonably at dinner with the family, and then wait till everyone went to bed before I snuck into the kitchen and dove face-first into the Pop-tarts, cereal, ice cream…whatever we had. Thus began the binge-eating-in-secret pattern that I struggle with to this day.

I live alone now, so secret binge-eating is no challenge at all. It’s only a secret in that I would never plow through an entire box of cookies or 4 ice cream bars in front of a friend. A couple of years ago, when I was in a relationship that has since ended and living with my boyfriend, I found myself falling into the pattern of sneaking food when he was not around. I forced myself to at least quit eating in secret—if I wanted a granola bar, I ate it sitting next to him on the couch.

That sneakiness, that private shame, that’s been a part of my eating since those early days of watching Mom struggle with her own weight. I think my behavior was about rebellion back then—I was angry that I had to cope with feeling fat and that I was not accepted by my father for who I was. The only model I had of weight management was my mother’s, which seemed absolutely unworkable for me. So I sent that angry, hungry girl away, but she never stayed away for long. During the daylight hours I ate reasonably and acted rationally, but after hours I became a Twinkie thief by the light of the midnight moon.

My mother eventually found a way to eat that worked well for her, and in the last several years of her life she attained and maintained a healthy weight comfortably. That was the role model I needed all those years ago. But me, I’ve never fully shaken my inner, angry Twinkie thief, and I still carry those resentments around with me…80 lbs of pissed off adolescent girl who won’t be denied. I need to say goodbye to her for good and to say goodbye to those 80 lbs that keep my anger so visible to the world.

War on the Homefront

2007-03-30T22:18:00.001-05:00

Every fat woman I’ve ever met (and most of the thin ones, too, now that I think about it) has her own personal history of war against her body. When I think about my own, I’m exhausted by how long, how sad, how freaking endless it’s been. I was first aware of being overweight at five years old. I remember the conversation so clearly. My father sat me down and explained to me that I was chubby and that I would have to do something about that, because it was a bad thing for a little girl to be. I said, “But Dad, you’re fat too,” and he patiently explained to me that it was OK for men to be fat, but for a little girl it was a Really, Really Bad Thing. I remember being surprised and a little mystified.

From there it was all downhill in terms of my relationship to my own body.

I was one of those girls that matured fairly early. Starting 5^th grade as a 10 year old, I was nearly at my adult height of 5’8”, and I had begun to develop breasts and hips. I also got braces a year or two before everyone else. I felt unbelievably tall, fat and awkward around my classmates, most of whom were still shaped like children. I started my first real, organized diet at 14, when I joined Weight Watchers with a friend. I felt like a whale. Now I look back on pictures of that time, and I realize that I wasn’t fat. I was shaped like a woman. What shows in the pictures from that period of my life is not that I was fat, but that I was awkward and miserable. I was embarrassed to be alive. Throughout high school, I willed myself into invisibility by wearing generic, androgynous clothing and making sure that I did not stand out in any way.

And then, college. I was far enough away from the critical voice of my father that I began to experiment a little with clothing and with the idea that I was not too tragically fugly to live. I remember coming home for Christmas wearing a sweater I loved, with a bold, sort of Aztec-looking black and white pattern. My father took one look at me and said “I would think a woman of your size would choose something with a less obvious pattern.” I was a size 14!!! Gah, I shriveled inside, but I bounced back.

Since then, it’s been a gradual process of gaining confidence in my tastes, my style and my own worth. Unfortunately, it’s also been a process of gaining weight. About 5 years ago, I peaked out at 218 and decided that I needed to lose some weight. I adopted the Atkins diet, began to walk a lot, and over the course of a year lost about 40 lbs. I felt great! Control at last, and something to be proud of! But the weight didn’t stay off, and here I am, 5 years later, weighing in a 240. I’m happy to say that I seem to have permanently outgrown that sad, embarrassed child I used to be. But I’m not happy here, and it’s time to make some changes. Not because my father would like me to—he’s been waiting 35 years, since that first conversation, for me to cooperate and get skinny—but because I want to feel good in my own skin.

Baby steps

2007-03-29T20:31:00.000-05:00

I figure that this whole thing is about small changes that become lifelong habits. I’ve made a few of those lately, and I’m kind of proud of myself, even though they’re all small:

No more Diet Mountain Dew! Yeah, it’s diet. But I keep reading about how even diet sodas can contribute to weight gain or at least stall attempts at weight loss. But man, did I love my Dew–it’s been my major source of caffeine for quite some time now. Substituting a tasty blend of black and green tea now for my morning hit, which helps me feel nice and healthy. Less caffeine, more antioxidants. And truth be told, I was always sort of embarrassed (there’s that word again) by my Dew habit.
Bringing lunch to work more often. Our cafeteria has a real dearth of healthy food options for lunch. There’s the very popular fried chicken, the often overcooked but still satisfying pizza, the daily entree choice that we’ve coined The Tub of Slop. So I’ve been bringing leftovers more often, which nets me both a healthier lunch and the admiration of my co-workers. I know, I’m a hero.
More salads at lunch when I don’t bring my own. Work actually does have a good salad bar, and I’m making use of it more often and walking right by the fried chicken station (please, hold your applause).
Oh, and I bought cross-trainers the other day. I used to walk a ton for exercise, and I always wore either my Doc Martens or my Dansko clogs. I figured it was time to resurrect the walking habit, and perhaps my aging joints would appreciate a pair of proper tennis shoes. Oddly enough, my maiden voyage in them suggests that my old walkin’ gear might be more comfortable. Hm.

Like I said, wee changes, but you gotta start somewhere.

The journey begins with...

2007-03-28T20:23:00.000-05:00

A single step, right? A blog entry, maybe?

This is a weight-loss blog. I hope so, anyway. Right now it’s a “Wow. This feels really out of control and bad and I can’t believe I weigh as much as I do” blog. It’s a “can I really do this?” blog and a “What if I write about all of this and then can’t actually discipline myself to make any changes?” blog.

Well, here’s the thing. I’m fat. I’m 5′ 8″ tall and weight about 240 lbs. I’m big, people. I turned 40 last summer, and since then, I’ve started to see what all the fuss is about, health-wise. My blood pressure is starting to creep up. I hurt my knee in a fall last October, and it has taken forever to heal, no doubt in part because of the jackhammering I give it every day just walking around on it.

The last few years have been really demanding ones. I wrote a dissertation and completed a more-than-full-time internship at the same time. I’m currently on a year-long post-doc fellowship, where I’m at work about 50 hrs per week. And I sit a lot. I’m a psychologist, so I spend most of my day with my ass in a chair, nodding and empathizing. Which, as it turns out, doesn’t burn a lot of calories.

Do I sound like I’m bitching? Oh, I’m not. Love my life, love my work. But I look back and see that I’ve gained 60 lbs in the past few years, and that I really have let graduate school nibble away at my health until I am what I am now: fat, unfit, and embarrassed.

The ‘embarrassed’ thing…that’s big for me (no pun intended). If I allowed myself to think about it, I would be too ashamed to leave the house in the morning. I had fits like that in college, where I would look in the mirror and decide I was too fugly to leave my dorm room. I don’t have them anymore, and I’m proud of that. But I’m still embarrassed about myself. I don’t date, because I’m embarrassed. And I don’t ask for help when I need it, because I’m embarrassed.

And that’s where this blog comes in. I can’t do this alone. I need to change my life, and I need to get at least a little public about it. For accountability, for fellowship, for something…

And this is hard for me. I’ve always been one to hide my vulnerabilities and uncertainties, for fear that I’ll be criticized. That’s a family thing, and something for a future post, I imagine. So, even to start this blog feels like ripping off my clothes and parading my fat self down the street, but I need to do it. I need to let the world help me.

So, this journey. I’ve been on enough of them to know that they’re never what you think they’re going to be when you start out. This one will be no different. But I know this: It starts with a single post.