Thinking about tomorrow

Hello! I’m just back from a week-long vacation in Texas for a family wedding. I’ve been avoiding this blog, though, because I got scared of the promises I made here in my last post. I was so excited after my grueling visit to the kickboxing class that I said I’d start going every Monday! Yeah! Woo, fitness!

Well, what happened the next Monday? I’m not really sure, but when I woke up that day I felt some combination of unprepared/scared/tired, so I didn’t go. And then the week after that I didn’t want to do kickboxing right before getting on a plane for vacation, so I skipped again. Yesterday I was in an airplane watching my feet swell, definitely in no position to kick anything. All that fun momentum just ground to a dead stop.

I feel guilty for skipping out, and in my mind I have a zillion dumb excuses. My one legitimate excuse is that I probably should not be doing high impact exercise with my left ankle, which is due to have a fragile piece of hardware removed from it on October 17th, hopefully increasing my flexibility. I run the risk of breaking this particular screw by jumping and kicking stuff, which would obviate the surgery and piss me off. Especially since I now find out that even with my insurance, I am going to pay at least $500 out of pocket. (And did I mention my $245 red light camera ticket? Arghgh!) Basically, the kickboxing class membership ($80/month) and my physical ability to participate are in direct competition with my upcoming surgery ($500) and recovery (no kicking at least until the wound heals). Also, it is nice to feel like this surgery is “protecting” me from strenuous exercise, when in fact I am kind of terrified of surgery. What is more scary, getting an IV inserted in my arm or being the least fit person in a mirrored studio? Clearly my inner poise is not up to the task of handling either, right now.

While I was in Texas, it felt like I was on a food seesaw. We were trying to be thrifty tourists, so we didn’t eat at a restaurant for every single meal, which made the first half of the trip rather healthy. During the second half, though, we hooked up with my husband’s family and went to half a dozen wedding brunches and receptions and dinners. This started to put a strain on my nice wedding outfits! Then during our last two days, we visited my husbands’ friends and had a kind of Texas Food Last Hurrah, including the famously amazing chicken tenders at Wings N More (if you’ve ever visited Aggieland, you know what I mean, and trust me when I say these are not your average fried bits of chicken), pulled pork sandwiches from a great barbecue place, and some tasty Tex Mex. My stomach was both happy and grumpy at this, even though we were skipping breakfasts left and right since we were so full from the night before. I haven’t weighed myself since returning after midnight last night, but I feel fairly secure that it won’t be an enormous gain, even with such a splurge at the end. I guess we’ll see.

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My watchword, as I establish my home and work routines for the fall, is to think about tomorrow. How do I want to feel tomorrow? It is really hard for me to stop and think this way, when I would rather get a decaf latte and a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast and maybe some kind of greasy lunch (does anyone else do this? “I deserve this greasy lunch because I’m tired.” Never mind that greasy food will only make me feel MORE tired!) This morning I had some rice cakes with my tea, and when I was hungry for lunch, I avoided the food court at work because I knew I would make a poor choice. So I took a list to the grocery store of things that would make me feel better later, like fruit, chicken salad, and some crackers to eat it with. I still wanted a cheeseburger and a bar of chocolate, but I avoided that temptation, clutching my tiny grocery list like it was holy.

I want to practice thinking like this; in a way it is just like practicing meditation. For instance, I’m focusing on a single image to help me meditate through anxiety-filled medical procedures: one blue ocean wave that rises and falls according to my breath. The more I think about this calming image, the more common it becomes: during a traffic jam, during a bumpy airplane ride, when I’m having a hard time falling asleep. Why can’t food be more like this? Some things are, like coffee. I have an instinct to avoid it because I know it makes me anxious and jittery. I want an instinct like this that helps me avoid food that makes me feel good right now (cheeseburger), and instead make choices that will make me feel good later. When I think about food, I want to stop and think about the future instinctively, just like that calm blue wave has started to appear when I’m stressed. Do I want to wake up and hate my tight clothes because I ate too much at dinner? Do I want to be so full after lunch that I hole up in my office so no one sees my stomach through my tshirt? Or do I want to feel perfectly satisfied and not stuffed? My first instinct is to give in to the anxiety — which makes trips to the doctor’s office hell, and makes my stomach unhappy with junk food. If I can learn to resist that initial tug of anxiousness, I can learn to think about what will make me happy both now and later.

My tomorrow self, my later self, is helping me think about the emotional side of eating. For me, emotional eating is all about anxiety and fake entitlements — the “I deserve this tub of ice cream because I’m tired” mindset. There are so many things about my life I want to fix — finances, food, garden, house cleaning, exercise — but today I’m just focusing on this one thing, how I want to feel tomorrow and what choices I can make to get there.

Journeying back

Writing here about this part of my life might be new, but I have been doing the yo-yo dance of diets and exercise for quite some time. Previously, I had catalogued some of this stuff over at PeerTrainer, which was an awesome place to get some community support, though that part of it eventually took up too much time to be useful. But I do have archived food and exercise logs there, going back to 2006!

It would be nice to travel back to 2006. Back then, I was training intensely to be on a roller derby team. I was down to 172 pounds, but man was I working hard for it! Not only was I walking a lot during my daily commute (1 mile plus a million stairs), but I was going to the gym at least three times a week for cardio work, doing Eight Minutes in the Morning for core strength plus 90 crunches, and going for long walks after dinner with my sweetie. All that PLUS two team practices every week, which was over two hours of intense skating drills for endurance, skills and strength. No wonder the pounds were dropping off each week!

But isn’t it funny how even with all that weight loss, I still didn’t think it was real? My instinct now is to say that my analog scale must have been wildly inaccurate. But is that true? The real problem is that my mental image of myself is so fixed that I don’t think I look that different today at 212 lbs than I did back then at 172. I was just as unhappy about how my body looked back then; even though I was incredibly proud of my muscles, I felt all my wobbly bits were just as wobbly. To my mind, even at a lower weight, I’m still the same: I have always worn fat pants. I have always disliked my arms. I have always had this belly that gets in my way, and these thighs that rub together when I walk. I have never been able to cross my legs comfortably.

Here’s another key part of that sad litany: I never got that good at rollerskating.

The awesome time I spent training with the roller derby team was cut short by a really bad ankle break and surgery, forcing me to spend all summer in bed and a whole year recovering the strength to walk. Well, at least, that’s the simple version of that story. The more honest version of that story is that my self-esteem was still so fragile back then. I didn’t even think of it as a problem. But it created so many problems, after that one simple injury.

When I was carried out of roller derby practice on a stretcher that fateful afternoon, I was in such intense pain and shock from my broken ankle but I waved to my teammates like a beauty queen, smiling at them. They cheered me on. My captains visited me in the hospital and brought flowers. And I was determined to put on a brave face. It was only later, when the reality of my injury set in, that I started to break myself down in retrospect, blaming myself for the injury, blaming the team leaders for not protecting me, feeling stupid and alone and vulnerable, hating acquaintances for offering support, miserable from the pain and the immobility all summer long, and my hobbled attempts to walk all that next year. I stayed away from roller derby like the plague. I told myself they didn’t want me, they were glad to get rid of me, and they didn’t understand my injury at all. I completely erased myself from the team, the better to pretend I had never tried at all, I thought. I berated myself internally for having the audacity to be a moving, happy, experimenting human being. I let my lack of skating skill stand in for a lack of worthiness – even though I was a complete beginner! With potential! Picking up new skills quickly! I let my one mistake, my one wrong turn that led to a bad injury, become symbolic of what I felt was an essentially flawed self, who had been justly and severely punished for daring to aim high.

What I had really done was to punish myself for being happy. I didn’t get injured because I was stupid, and my injury didn’t damn me to some eternal hell of unhappy Never To Skate Or Dare Again, though I let it do that for a long time.

Before my injury, I was training to do full pushups! I wore a skirt to work one day and my thighs didn’t rub together. I learned to do crossovers and turning toe stops the week before my injury! I had not remembered this stuff at all, until I re-read it in my old logs. I was happy, positive, sweaty and alive. But having zero self-esteem, I thought I deserved my accidental injury, and I broke down all my memories to convince myself I had never made any progress.

I remember feeling very resentful of the world when I was injured, because I didn’t think anybody understood how bad it was, how much pain I went through, how it complicated even the simplest things in my life. But the real problem was that no one understood how this injury had laid bare all my hatred for myself, all my self-recriminations and anger and vulnerabilities. I wasn’t just caring for a healing ankle, I was trying to live through a crisis of spirit. I truly believed I had been stupid, that it had been my fault. That one injury allowed me to unleash my worst feelings toward myself, and that is what made everything truly difficult. Not the crutches, but the feeling that people were justified in ignoring me and not holding the door open. Not the swelling in my leg, but the feeling that I was so ugly that everybody would be disgusted if they knew. Not the physical immobility, but the fact that I was stuck inside my own head, and I didn’t like what I saw.

I want to say that two and a half years later, I have climbed out of that internal darkness, but it is still something I struggle with. The simplest explanation is that I gained weight last year because I couldn’t exercise due to injury, and I was in graduate school so I couldn’t devote a lot of time or energy to eating healthy. But the truth is that I was also struggling with a deep void within myself, and I was covering over that void with class work and good grades and planning for life after graduation.

I don’t want to be driven by fear or boredom, and I don’t want to build a “happy” body that is incapable of sustaining emotional setbacks. It’s tricky when self-love and weight loss are so closely tied together. The steps I’m taking today don’t feel radically different from before, but I suppose they are animated by more love, a greater desire to be out in the world and see things, by the knowledge that loving myself allows me to love the world. It’s a lesson to me that I am so shocked to re-read of my successes in roller skating before my injury, just as it is shocking to see old pictures of myself in which I look downright cute (when I know for a fact I hated my body back then). If I can’t love myself, it won’t matter how much energy I put into losing weight – because it won’t feel good and I won’t sustain healthy habits if they’re not rooted in something much, much bigger and deeper than simple numbers.