Thin Dreams Die Hard

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?

Vulnerable

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

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

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.

Great Workout Mysteries of the Universe

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Sick

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.

Weekly Weigh-In

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.

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?

Weekly Weigh-In, Week Three

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.

Lunching Alone

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.

Meet & Eat

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

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?

One Big Hunger

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?

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

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

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.