Victories in Mindfulness!

• Yesterday, after resting my back for nearly two weeks, I woke up early to go for a walk and yet my back still felt too cranky. Instead of whining and going back to bed, I popped in a Bollywood bhangra dance DVD and shimmied for 35 minutes.

• Last night, when I felt perfectly justified in ordering pizza delivery, I took a deep breath and made a quinoa, sautéed rainbow chard, and steamed shrimp dinner instead. It was delicious and my stomach was very happy to avoid a fat-and-dairy gutbomb.

• Today, when I had a million deadlines screaming for attention around midday, I made myself go to Yoga class and take some time to be in my physical body and relax. For at least an hour, I let go of work and just concentrated on the breath, my body, and the calm dim room.

I’m feeling good about days like this, even it takes a judicious amount of soothing my cranky inner child in order to get through the day. Thich Naht Hanh, a Buddhist and Nobel peace prize winning author I’ve been reading lately, advocates soothing yourself like a crying infant when anger or frustration pops up. Instead of simply calming myself down, I try to extend love and caring thoughts toward the part of me that is feeling bad. It works better than simply trying to smooth over the difficult emotion! At least it does for me.

Yoga triumphs and musings on metabolic rates

Strike a pose

I’m proud to announce that yesterday in Yoga class I was able to do Pigeon Pose for the first time! Woohoo! I have been struggling and struggling with the flexibility required, as it combines flexibility in hamstrings, lower back, and hip flexors, each of which are particularly stiff areas for me. In eight weeks of Yoga, instead of Pigeon, I have instead laid on my back and stretched my hamstrings against the wall. It felt so, so good to finally be in the pose and feel so happy and grateful that my body is capable and is progressing.

It was almost as awesome as two weeks ago, when I was magically able to do a 90° handstand against the wall — who knew? In that pose, I was upside down looking at myself in the mirror, always a funny sight, with my feet braced on the mirror at hip level. It was also a weird moment because I could literally feel my brain flip-flopping between joy and strength and then insecurity, as I saw myself in the mirror. It was really hard to hold onto that moment of joy when my inner critic came out with ugly words. If I closed my eyes, I could feel joy and awe and giddiness surging through me, and when I opened them, I could feel the pit in the bottom of my stomach that said everyone can see you, be careful. Come on, brain, I’m trying to work on inner peace here!

Puttin’ some science on my intuition

Since last week I’ve dropped another 1.5lbs, which is also a good feeling. I genuinely feel good about the food choices that are getting me here. For the first time, I’m seeing predictable weight loss in response to eating “clean” after a weekend splurge (oh devil Brunch, get thee behind me!). As an added bonus, my husband is totally gung-ho about our meals lately — salads! Grilled chicken! He is truly a master at grilling meats to perfection. He still orders the french toast dripping with caramel-and-cream on the weekends, though :)

Before, I don’t think I had a clue (without obsessively counting calories) what was a “good” food day, the kind that would keep me energetic and full throughout the day and avoid a groaning stomach — I just kind of aimed in the general direction of healthy foods, portions be damned. I could aim for a calorie number, but it didn’t seem to have any correlation with feeling good, other than that hollow “hey, my numbers look good” feeling I get when I’m tracking my food closely. So since I’ve been eating more according to intuition and the constant-snacking method for the last three weeks or so, I’ve been curious what the actual caloric breakdown is, so here we go:

150 cals – Granola bar, 8:00 am

270 cals – Greek yogurt , 10:30 am (sometimes w/ raspberries or granola)

406 cals – Spinach salad w/ cottage cheese and fruit (7 cals spinach, 70 cals cottage cheese, 14 cals strawberries, 15 cals honeydew, 12 cals watermelon, 3 cals cuke slices, 165 cals salted sunflower seeds, 120 thousand island dressing) (This might sound ridiculously healthy but it tastes so decadent and yummy to me!)

130 cals – crackers, 3:30 pm

500 cals – marinated grilled chicken, shrimp, etc., plus salad or grilled veggies

200 cals – chocolate jello pudding with Cool Whip (latest fave dessert to use up stuff in the fridge)

TOTAL: 1,656 calories in an average day. Verrrrrry interesting. I think my intuition is working!

I know that resting/basal metabolic rate (RMR/BMR) calculators are notoriously iffy, because in looking mine up, I was given 2,020 calories by Physics Diet, 1,671 by ShapeUp.org, 1,737 by Discovery Health, and 1,720 by, um, Bodybuilding.com. ShapeUp.org gives a good explanation of how cutting calories below your RMR will slow your metabolism down in order to conserve energy for essential functions (like breathing). It’s hard to know if I’m cutting my calories too low, or hitting at the right spot, without paying someone to run a fancy machine and give me a better answer. But if my body felt too restricted, I wouldn’t be losing weight, so I’m guessing that everything is fine for now.

Since self-esteem is a muscle I have to use every day, I’ll take this opportunity to remind myself that this has been a pretty good week. I’ve felt calm enough not to be ruffled by the heat, and centered enough to have a heart-to-heart with my husband about Important Stuff, and I felt challenged and rewarded by Yoga. Part of self-esteem is taking the time to respect my body, and this week has been great for that. You know what would be pretty awesome? Taking advantage of the cooler weather this weekend to take a nice long bike ride. Let’s do it!

The _____est girl in the room

In my quest to Act Like A Fit Person, I’m now attending a weekly yoga class and a weekly hula dancing class, both at work where I have multiple colleagues reminding me to go and making me feel virtuous about hauling around my purple yoga mat and workout bag with an occasionally smug smile. (I’m trying to work on that one — doesn’t everyone hate smug yoga people?)

Just for the record, I want to state that I am proud of myself for going to these classes, because not only do they involve going to the scary gym across campus, but I am inflexible and fat, not to mention out of shape. Yoga can be a special kind of hell for fat people, or at least for me anyway. Inflexibility aside, there are poses and moves where my chubs just get in the way! The lovely yoga teacher is very lovely and loving, a big proponent of doing What Feels Good To You Today, but I still have trouble with a few things. Let’s not forget about my ankle injury, which makes my left ankle extremely inflexible and my left leg in general kind of weak. So yoga involves a couple of scary things:

1. Bending my ankle,
2. while balancing,
3. and while sweating in front of people (a fear that deserves its own entry!)
4. and being the fattest girl in the room
5. all in front of a giant wall of mirrors!

(Can you tell I love lists?) So yoga is a big test of self love, for me. I have to shut down my anxieties about looking around the room, comparing myself to others, and simply focus on being inside my own body and my own mind, trying my hardest to exist in the pose. I admit, I still have some residual shame when I see myself in the mirror, though. All my nice internal peace whooshes out of my mind to be replaced by other thoughts. Is that really how I look to other people? Are they looking at me now?

Also: Do they think I don’t belong here? I really have to push that one away. That’s one I work on almost every day. For a long time I thought that being sad and anxious all the time was the price I was forced to pay for not having a “normal” body. I thought that most people were disgusted by me, and that they were correct, and my only option was to apologize for my own existence. I know now that this is not true; that every person is entitled to a good life, no matter what their external self looks like. If I believe in putting love and peace and optimism (with occasional sarcasm) out into the world, then I also have to believe that I am part of the world, and therefore deserving some of that universal love, too.

In any case, being in yoga is a good test. I am a total novice, clumsy with my lack of balance and therefore painfully fulfilling the Clumsy Fat Person stereotype. While I’m sweating and feeling very visible and awkward, it feels like the mental work to keep myself centered is just as difficult. I love that this is the aim of yoga — to be mindful while pushing your body in new ways. I love it even when I am sweating and tipping over from my Mountain Pose.

The hula dancing class is another matter, though. Yesterday, during the first session, we learned six very basic steps, and then learned to string them together to the soothing sounds of some ukulele music. And what do you know, that random belly dancing class I took eight million years ago paid off, because damnit, I know how to move my hips! I picked up the moves fairly quickly, though I am no dancer, and I was really proud to be in the front row and moving along with people who had taken this class last year. I was also really proud of only sneaking a few glances at my fellow hula dancers, because if I have a right to learn yoga with my crappy equilibrium and my inflexibility, then that skinny lady in the back row also has a right to learn hula even though her hips don’t really move. Health at every weight, Hula at every ability, friends!

I wouldn’t say I am disheartened by yoga and then lifted up again by hula class, though the two occur in that order — I work really hard at hard things one day, and work only a little bit at things that come easily the next day. But the contrast between the two classes is certainly nice. I may be the fattest, least flexible girl in the yoga room, but I am the girl with the shimmying hips in the hula room, and that feels really, really good.

PS – One day I want to try a yoga dvd with the very awesome Megan Garcia who is a fellow Smith College alumna! As I recently learned in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, she promotes yoga for large bodies and has special techniques of “moving the flesh” that help with some of the different needs of our bodies. How awesome!