The No Angst Policy

I spent a good part of this morning trying to decide whether or not to go back to that gym class today. I have felt a lot better about it after talking to my trainer who assured me that it's a fucking hard class and most people who come once don't come back and that he knows I don't stop to rest because I'm lazy. I felt all validated and encouraged. And then I got a cold early in the week and thought, well, I may be well enough to work out by Saturday, but I certainly won't be up for that class. Which was a great, no angst excuse. Then the cold really never got that bad and I was pretty much entirely well by yesterday. So I had to make a decision. I went back and forth.

Running would be good.
Maybe I would even be up for a workout as hard as class, but did I really feel like being around other people?
But cross-training is really important.
But I do cross-train. In this very week there has been weight-lifting, running, and swimming -- I'm not in a rut.
But if I don't go today, maybe it'll be easier for me to chicken out of going other days.
Etc...

And then I remembered a philosophy I adhere to at work.

I'm a children's librarian and while we have plenty of rules and thou-shalt-nots in my library, we also have what we call The No Tears Policy. If a small child is panicking about something -- wants a prize she hasn't earned, absolutely must borrow this book even though he has fines -- we go ahead and break rules to avoid tears. Give her the prize, let him check out the book. No Tears is a priority, and I believe in that.

I remembered, after all my deliberating this morning, that I have a No Tears Policy for myself -- or more accurately, No Angst. That's what has kept me sane about all the decisions that affect my body. No Angst over whether or not to eat a second cupcake. No Angst over whether or not I lost weight this week. No Angst over when or how or how much I work out. And I felt so relieved. I put on my workout clothes, went to the gym, waved at my trainer, put my headphones in and ran on the treadmill for 45 minutes all by myself. I stretched for a long time afterward because stretching felt good. Plenty of workout, zero angst. Maybe I'll feel like class next week or the week after, but deciding against it today felt like the right decision.

A couple of you commented last week with similar stories of gym class fear. I hope you can get past the fear if you want to. I hope that if you want to practice yoga or go to your trainer's class even though everyone else in it appears to be in better shape than you, you manage to suck it up and do it and reap the benefits. But I hope that if you decide the angst involved isn't worth it, that you go do something else that makes you happy without feeling like that class is something you should do. You should do what works for you. We all deserve to exercise happy.

Working Out with Other People

I would like to begin with the disclaimer that my trainer rocks. I adore him to no end and any complaining I am about to do is not in his direction.

He teaches this class at the gym on Saturday afternoons. It's a crazy mix of strength stuff and cardio stuff, a couple round robins of different exercises and some stuff we do all together as a group. It's unbelievably hard work. It kind of kills the rest of the day for me because all I can do is lie on the couch and marvel at how my limbs are useless. And I kind of dig that. I like the hard work and it's a good kind of fatigue. I like that it's sort of a freebie session with him -- an opportunity for me to do a workout I wouldn't do on my own.

But there are other people. I'm a friendly person, very social, almost extroverted most of the time. But there are times when I really don't want other people to exist, and while working out is one of those times. When I run on the treadmill, I take my glasses off and listen to my ipod and I'm in a bubble where no one else exists. I love that. In class, occasionally there's someone friendly who introduces herself and wants to chat. I hate that shit. I mean, I understand that for many people, that's why they take gym classes -- because it's a social experience. For me, it's an unavoidable side-effect of the free workout with my trainer. I can live with it.

More difficult is the fact that I cannot keep up. I can do most of everything. But it's damn hard. Everyone is red and sweaty and panting, but I'm the only one who occasionally just stops because, frankly, I want neither a heart attack nor an asthma attack and if I don't stop, one of the two is likely. I'm not vain, really. I don't know these people and don't care what they think about my fitness level. But it makes me feel lame. I get a lot of exercise. I run and swim and lift heavy things and take yoga classes (where, incidentally, it is encouraged to do what your body wants to do, even if the rest of the class is doing otherwise...) When I'm doing those things alone, I feel like I'm in pretty good shape. I don't care how slow I am, so long as my heart rate is up. But when I see everyone else managing to do what my body just cannot do, I feel inadequate. I feel fat. I feel like the reason I can't do shit is because I'm fat, because that's my go-to excuse or something.

I've rested and showered and rested more and eaten lunch and rested still more. My body feels good. I feel strong and also relaxed. But I'm wanting not to go to class next Saturday because it makes my brain feel lame.

Oh, Hello There!

Hi.

It appears that someone is reading this. Maybe as many as four of you! I'm flattered, really. When I decided to do this it was primarily because I wanted to write about the experience of losing weight -- wanted to remember later what the emotional pieces were, since I knew they would be changing day to day. I also wanted to make myself organize those thoughts while I was thinking them. In another piece of my world, I'm a professional writer, but what I usually write is a very different animal. So this is an experiment.

I decided to experiment in the form of a blog for a couple reasons. Reason the first was to keep me writing and keep me organized. If I were writing in a notebook, I'd be more likely to write scattered, run-on sentences about my whole emotional life rather than attempting to organize thoughts specifically about my body and food issues. Of course, there are still scattered run-on sentences here. Oh well.

Reason the second is this: Over the last several years, as I've lost and gained weight and tried to make some sense of what my relationship to my body means and how I fit into the world, I have read several books about people dealing with the same stuff and I have found them to be invaluable. I grew up, and into my 20s and 30s feeling very alone with my fat. I had never talked to anyone or read anything that made me believe that others were struggling in the same ways as I was. It hadn't even occurred to me. And then, I can't remember how the first book fell in my lap, but it did, and I started reading. Books about people who started out much bigger than me and ended up much smaller. Or about people smaller than me who felt bigger, or people just my size who were comfortable there. Everyone's story was different, everyone's relationship with food and clothing and her mother was unique. But familiar. There was always something that overlapped with my own experience -- the comfort of eating too much when no one was looking, the pressure from family members, either overt or subtle, to lose weight, to be different, the shame of not fitting someplace -- into chairs or socially acceptable clothing sizes, feeling both elation and discomfort with losing weight, with inhabiting an unfamiliar body. It is comforting to recognize myself in these stories.

And yet I know that my story isn't just like any of the ones I read. And I am a writer. A writer writes. Knowing that reading someone else's story is helpful to me makes me hope that reading my story will be helpful to others. I started writing and posting my blog without ever seeking out readers. I am shy, and this is still an experiment, after all. But I am glad you are here. Welcome. Please comment and/or email me freely. I would love to hear from you.

Some of the above-mentioned books:

I'm Not The New Me by Wendy McClure
Passing for Thin by Frances Kuffel
Half-Assed by Jennette Fulda
Tales from the Scale by Erin J. Shea
The Incredible Shrinking Critic by Jami Bernard
Confessions of a Carb Queen by Susan Blech
Thin is the New Happy by Valerie Frankel

Many of these people are bloggers. I'm too lazy to create links, but I'm sure you can find them if you haven't already.

Struggling

The last couple weeks have been challenging for me. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I embraced it thoroughly. I threw a party the weekend before, and though the dinner I cooked was healthy, I also made monster cupcakes and chocolate demon mice for dessert. I made cocktails. It was no big deal -- I had some of everything, but didn't feel out of control. And then there were left-over cupcakes and chocolate mice in my house for a week. I ate a cupcake every night. Still not a big deal, but I wouldn't have eaten a cupcake every night if they hadn't been there. I also neglected to go grocery shopping that week because I'd shopped for the party and had left-over real food, too. But that didn't last and I ended up buying dinner every night instead of cooking. Again, not a disaster, but several less healthy choices than I would normally have made. Halloween day came and there was candy at work. I ate a lot of candy at work. And eating candy somehow brought back old feelings of needing to eat as much as I could while no one was watching, so I ate plenty of real food, too. Then I went to someone else's dinner party and ate more candy. On Saturday, I had to work and ate more candy.

When I went to my Weight Watchers meeting on Monday, I had gained two pounds.

None of that, in and of itself, really bothers me. I feel like it's important to be able to embrace Halloween, to eat crap if it makes me happy, and to not feel guilty about it even if it doesn't make me happy. I've been losing weight steadily for seven months, so gaining two pounds one week doesn't really matter.

What scares me is that while I'm feeling that way, I don't trust that I'll get this back. This has been easy, losing weight. I'm enjoying myself, and I have no interest in getting to a place where I start worrying and feeling guilty and telling myself not to eat things I want to eat. That mindset fucks me up. I truly believe that the most valuable thing I'm doing right now is not worrying.

But it only works if I keep wanting to eat spinach and chickpea curry and go running at 6:00 every morning. If I start wanting to sit in front of the TV and eat cupcakes, it's all over. Right now I feel like I have it back. I made that curry over the weekend, as well as a vegetarian chili, cucumber salad, and roasted root vegetables. The idea was to distract myself with an abundance of yummy healthy food, and it worked. This week has been better. But it feels tenuous. I fear that I'll feel out of control again and not bounce back so quickly. I couldn't even write about it while I was wanting to eat candy constantly -- it felt like the struggle would be real if I named it, so I name it now in the past tense because that's safer.

I'm entering a place I haven't been before -- a longer period of successful weight loss, a smaller clothing size, and it feel scary and like it will be easy to lose.

More Semantics

I find myself in a socially awkward situation when people say to me, "You've lost weight." I believe that they expect me to say, "Thank you." Only, is that a compliment? It's an observation, a statement of fact. If someone said, "You got a new tattoo," or, "You cut your hair," it would be unclear whether or not she approved of the change in my appearance. I would say, "Yes I did," and would not say, "Thanks," unless she expressed a positive opinion.

So I follow my belief in language, rather than the universal assumption that losing weight is an inherently good thing. I nod and say, as neutrally as I am able, "I have lost some weight." If she then says, "You look good," I smile and say, "Thank you."

Am I being petty?