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

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.

Weekly Weigh-In

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!

Family Wreckage

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.

Weekly Weigh-In, Week Whatever

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

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?

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...

…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.