a keen life

Hi! Bless me, blogosphere, It has been 10 days since my last post. I didn’t go anywhere! I wasn’t sick and I didn’t fall off any wagons. I did have a little crisis of conscience, though.

The same day I wrote my last post, I had a really difficult therapy session and it seemed like all my healthy ideas and goals went whooshing out the window. Since then, I’ve been thinking and thinking about it, and going in little mental circles, and then trying to write about in my paper journal, and not quite failing but not making sense of it either. I realize I was waiting for it to really resolve itself before I wrote here about it, but now it seems like one of those large mental events, like a switch going off, where I have to rebuild a sense of momentum and security, not because I lost it but because my fundamental assumptions about life have changed. (Notice how I am writing alllll about the problem but not really mentioning the problem! This, too, is part of the problem.)

I realized that I like to keep secrets from myself. That is, I like to think I can. It’s taken me a couple weeks to figure out that maybe this is a case of Fat Thinking at work. The more mundane version goes like this: if I am ashamed of my body for being fat (a self-esteem issue I haven’t quite resolved), then perhaps if I don’t shop in a fat girl store or appear to dive for the last brownie then no one will know I am fat! Ridiculous, right? If anyone cares at all, they can just look right at my body and have their own private thoughts, end of story. I can’t control how others perceive me, only how I choose to perceive my self. This is how I try to keep secrets from myself: If I’m trying to improve my self-esteem, then I shouldn’t focus on weight numbers, because it’s getting fit that really counts! Ignore the fact that I don’t feel good in my body (back pain is a good example) because admitting I want to lose weight means I’m not focusing on self-esteem. Therefore, think about Health At Every Size and self-esteem all day long, and completely ignore that voice inside that says I want to lose weight (even though, as I’ve said before, I secretly think that pursuing my Good Girl goals of fitness and good food will lead to weight loss anyway).

But! Where am I focusing my energy? Every morning I refuse to drink water until I’ve gone to the bathroom, done my 10-min morning exercises, and taken a shower, at which point I weigh myself and record my info at Physics Diet. I try to eat healthily, but I don’t plan out meals and I totally abandon healthy eating on some weekends, and then get frustrated on Monday when I’ve gained a pound or more. My therapist asked me, what will make you feel good? I didn’t hesitate to respond, “lose weight.” In essence, I’ve set myself up for failure if I have a secret goal of weight loss that directly conflicts with my other goal, which is to accept myself for who I am.

Pondering all this, a good friend prompted me to think about whether I would accept stagnation in my career because I thought I was “supposed” to like my job, when in reality it sucked and my ambitions were higher. The answer of course, is no — I would work hard to get where I wanted to be, no matter what! When it comes to my body, though, I’m stuck in this rut where pursuing my goal of self-esteem means I’m not supposed to pay attention to weight loss. Because after all, what happens if I exercise my lungs out and couldn’t lose weight? Shouldn’t I work for self-esteem now so that I reap the benefits no matter what size I am?

There’s an obvious solution to my conundrum. And that is to accept the fact that I can love myself and still want to lose weight. (And not because I’m scared of judgment, but maybe because I’m sick of back pain. Or so I can do those Yoga poses that have eluded me.) I think I’ve been wandering in this maze of confusion for a couple weeks because I just couldn’t quite accept that premise. It explains why I struggled and struggled against the idea that I could work on loving myself and also work toward weight loss — doesn’t that mean I’ve given up on my current body? Sigh. Somehow all my work on building self-esteem hasn’t sunk in, because this week, today, I’m struggling to love myself and move forward toward my goals. It’s hard to know what it looks like. Maybe I’m doing it already, I’m not sure. All I know is that suddenly the mental work of being my best self became a lot harder than it was before.

Anyway. I’m not feeling resolved about all this. But this is as far as I’ve come so far in trying to think about, around, and through this thorny issue.

So far this week, I have been unmotivated and overtired. And therefore cranky. How come I’m not exercising and eating healthy food? Whine, whine whine. Part of this is that I just got home from a week of work travel and…less than optimal eating. I had a bad case of the traveling blues, because even if I were to exert perfect control, dine on nothing but fresh fruit and salads, and exercise two hours per day, there are still the following issues:

1. Not my bed
2. Airplanes are scary and my feet swell
3. Lots of unfamiliar people
4. New places to get used to

Basically, I am a classic introvert and new stuff is tiring for me. That’s not to say I didn’t have fun in Chicago! That I didn’t learn stuff and meet cool people! But it’s taking me some time to recover, I guess. Though I came right home from the airport and put every single thing in its proper place, it’s like I left my brain scattered between here and Chicago, and it’s only slowly coming back into one piece.

There are a lot of factors that go into having a good day and feeling good about myself (mentally, physically, emotionally), and juggling all of these factors requires a lot of energy. Inspired by a fabulous post on Elastic Waist about an unimaginably perfect day, my perfect day might look like this: Rise near dawn after a refreshing eight hours of sleep, complete a rigorous and reviving workout, take a luxurious shower and do a face mask, weigh in with a perfect 1lb loss, dress in effortlessly stylish clothes laid out the night before, eat a clean and nutritiously filling breakfast, arrive at work with a clean mind and work efficiently all morning, go to afternoon yoga with focus and clarity or afternoon hula with a smile, have an even more productive afternoon of loving my job, listen to affirmations on the commute home, weed and water the garden, cook a nutritious meal with enough for leftovers, meditate and write in my self-esteem workbook, pack a nutritious lunch for the next day, clean the kitchen and go to bed early. All this while paying attention to my spouse, keeping up with friends and email and blogs, watching a few favorite tv shows, all that other stuff.

Yikes. That’s an ambitious day. It’s full of lots of things that interlock with the previous day and set up good things for the following day. I don’t know that it’s actually achievable. But unless the whole thing is in place, then maybe I’m not doing enough, and it won’t all add up to self-esteem and self acceptance, not to mention weight loss and good nutrition. Everything must! be! perfect!

So yesterday, after being thrown out of my routines for a week and coming home to all this angsty trantrum crap, I realized that all I needed to do was focus. Maybe just on one thing. I can’t change the past, I can’t get rid of that 3 pound travel gain, and I can’t have a completely perfect day.

Tonight, sitting underneath a quilt on the couch (it is still a blessedly cool Spring here in Portland) I am happier and more peaceful than I’ve felt in several weeks. A few good things collided accidentally today: yoga, work productivity, gardening. My plans are not quite in place, but I have my peace of mind back. I’m out of that little hole of confusion and grumpiness that held me captive for a while. It feels really, really good, and it does more for my self-esteem than any external thing.

Last week I received my (autographed!) copy of Jennette Fulda/Pasta Queen’s brand spanking new book, Half Assed: A Weight Loss Memoir. I have only been reading Jennette’s blog for a month or so, but I was so charmed by her sense of humor and her incredible journey that it only took me a couple days to read through her ENTIRE archives. It was a very tasty, satisfying blog binge, and it made me want more.

Her book was very satisfying on a completely different level, though, because she talks more about her philosophy of life, about the human moments, and about the inevitable childhood history stuff. If I thought she seemed like a cool chick after reading her blog (three parts humor, one part nerd), that impression was only deepened by the time I finished her book. I’m most drawn to her level-headed take on the world, and to her particular brand of fitness, which started with what was possible (a slow treadmill walk in the privacy of her home) and built up as she gained strength and confidence (marathon training outdoors in the cold rain!).That is the kind of approach I want to have: do what is possible, every day.

Since her story has been inspiring to me, I’ve been following the Blog Tour, where Jennette hopscotches around the web for interviews and other fun stuff. I was surprised to read the comments on Big Fat Deal’s interview, which started with basic Fat Acceptance and Health At Every Size stuff I had gleaned from PQ’s book & blog and other sources, and branched off into issues and anger that really made me think critically about how I approach health and bodysize.

The reason I started this blog was to write about the experience of incorporating a healthy lifestyle with my getting-stronger-every-day self esteem, which used to act like an invisible black hole, sucking the energy out of me on previous weight loss or fitness attempts. Without loving myself, I wasn’t able to find a balance between exercise, good nutrition, and good mental health.

Jennette said something in the Big Fat Deal interview that really resonated with me: “Self-acceptance isn’t the same thing as self satisfaction.” Meaning, if I love myself, that doesn’t mean that I have to be content with how my heart struggles as I lug around 90-plus pounds of extra fat. The opposite of PQ’s statement is also true: self satisfaction (lower weight, for instance) isn’t the same thing as self-acceptance. If this were true, no skinny person would ever have low self-esteem, right? It’s important not to take external indicators (weight, clothing sizes) as a proxy for truly feeling good in your own mind, even if they temporarily make you feel good. There is not a single tiny sundress in the universe that could negate that feeling of worthlessness that can steal over me in darker moments.

I think it’s these feelings that make me identify with the Health At Every Size movement, in some respects. But frankly, some of the comments to that original BFD interview were startling for their vehement rejections of Jennette’s views. For example, in discussing how she was shunned from a Fat Acceptance forum for trying to lose weight, Jennette made a comparison to hair color: “If I didn’t like being a brunette, no one would give me shit about dying my hair blonde.” For this statement, many BFD commenters took her to task for refusing to acknowledge the mechanisms of privilege that favor thinness in society and cast fatness as a moral hazard. (On the contrary, through her writing I think I would say she’s acutely aware of how privilege can work for or against a person.) However, there was also a lot of comments where I was uncomfortable with how her weight loss was seen as a silent (or not so very silent) rebuke to the Fat Acceptance community. Or at least certain commenters seemed to take it that way — that her positive message was entirely tied up with weight loss rather than fitness and self acceptance.

Maybe I want to defend Jennette (though she does an admirable job by herself!) because I’m still working out my own ideas of how to reconcile the goals of fitness and weight loss. Maybe I have been sheltered from the kind of “diets” that people rebel against, the ones based on temporary starvation or restriction — maybe I really was brainwashed by all those health classes about exercise and eating good food (even if I was maybe also getting brainwashed by the dairy and meat councils!), because aside from a brief and very sad episode of depression-induced anorexia, I have never attempted to lose weight in an unhealthy way. In an unhappy way, yes, but for the most part I gravitate towards good nutrition, balanced blood sugar, and plain old healthy exercise.

I tend to see healthy eating and exercise as goals unto themselves, though I do still get cranky when I don’t see the scale numbers going down. What if I became truly fit, a running swimming biking climbing walking skating leaping wondergirl, but I was still “fat”? That is the real challenge. That is where self acceptance really has to kick in, to override all those negative societal messages about “acceptable” body size.

I really don’t believe in weight loss for weight loss’s sake — I do believe in the endorphin high of holding a plank, or training to do full push-ups, or feeling my legs wobble deliciously after a long and vigorous walk. I believe in good food, and in learning not to use food as a way to regulate my emotions. I believe in gardening, and walking around the neighborhood, and stretching my mind to imagine a world in which I feel fabulous.

Is it wrong that I also think all these things will result in a smaller self? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about that part, because I do, deeply so. But I will get there with my self-esteem intact, and I’m not going to wait for some mythical number on the scale to magically grant me that feeling of happiness and satisfaction.

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.

I’m making some changes in my life. Here is my blog where I want to blab on and on about it!

I want to start this blog by cataloging everything that I think is wrong with me — but that’s part of the problem. I want to start with numbers and metrics and Iron Clad Plans, but that’s part of the problem, too. I do want to talk about all of this, though, and that is a big change, and perhaps the best place to start.

Okay, but I do have to talk about what I want to change, right? Here goes: I don’t want to be overweight. If you want to get technical about it, the BMI scale places me squarely in the obese range. I am 5′5″ and 213 pounds, and I barely fit into size 18 pants and XL tops. I have always been The Fat Girl, in my mind. It’s true what they say, that fat is a state of mind, because it’s not about being fat, it’s about not liking yourself. In 2001, in fact, I hated myself so much that I starved myself to a normal weight. But did I ever like my body? Heck no! I had zero self-esteem, and I was convinced that my wobbly stomach, thick thighs, and lumpy hips were still enormous, exactly as bad as they had always been. In fact, I would say that I disliked my body as much back then as I dislike it today, when I’m carrying over 90 pounds of excess fat. The whole time, I told myself that I would be happy if only I was skinny! Oh the magical life of slimness! It would be full of fun and love and beauty!

So what I want to do is change my way of thinking. I don’t just need to eat more vegetables and get more exercise, I need to affirm my love for myself and a self-image that incorporates active living. My lifelong fat thinking has taught me that as a fat person, I don’t go on walks out of the blue, and I don’t go have fun in a park just to enjoy a beautiful day. But what am I waiting for? What is the point of that waiting? There is not some “You Must Be This Thin To Enjoy This Activity” sign I need to worry about.

I need to start living like I enjoy life today, because I do, and I can, and I will. I can’t hide away and exercise in private until one day I can emerge newly toned and fit and ready to enjoy life! The mentality of hiding away until I’m “ready” is the same mentality that keeps me eating bad foods, or sitting on the couch feeling too dejected to go for a walk. I might not have gained all this weight in some deep dark cave, but I’ve certainly been holding my true self hostage in the dark for a long time. I made myself feel bad for wanting life, for enjoying life, because I didn’t deserve any of that if I was so fat.

Hiding in the quiet, too fearful to face my own self in the mirror or even the thoughts in my head? That is the mentality that allowed me to gain weight while pretending it didn’t matter, or it would be fixed later, or it was unfixable entirely. Part of my journey to a healthier life will be learning it is okay to be out in the real world, being every inch my glorious human self. I have to remind myself that I deserve good things, I deserve love and health and fun because I am putting good energy out into the universe, damnit! For so long I thought I was permanently in debt for every extra ounce I carried on my body, that no matter how good I was, it could never make up for my fatness. Now I’m learning that I have to take care of myself now, and love myself now, or that Future Beautiful Self will never emerge. My Beautiful Self is who I am now.

Anyway. That’s what I’m doing here. I want to write about making a beautiful life, loving myself through movement and good food.